It is one thing to identify broad patterns, to trace change over time; it is altogether another to uncover the full scope of a tragedy that played out across a nation over more than a decade that no one at the time knew was happening. Many Gene Autry cowboy suit incidents never made the news. Many that did did not identify the clothing a child was wearing. Any number that identified the clothing misidentified some important element of it: mistaking a cowboy suit for an Indian play suit, fur for fringes, suggesting it was not the same kind that others had been wearing. To undertake a search thinking one might find even every reported instance in this dramatically incomplete database is like asking an archive to be organized by the categories salient to the researcher who knows something that was not apparent at the time.

But what can be gleaned is nonetheless important to understanding how it was that despite many incidents making the news, the press and in turn its public continued to see these events as like all those other incidents of children burned at play that they knew about from life experience or read about in the paper. News reports reflected and reinforced the narrative of a serious national problem. That problem was children and fire. The lesson was one that public fire-safety campaigns had been teaching since at least the 1920s: Matches should be kept away from small children; playing with fire costs property and lives.

The individual, serial character of the incidents involving children wearing cowboy suits obscured their underlying shared or collective character. News coverage reflected and conveyed the sense that these were accidents, individual family tragedies, local news. During the summer of 1944, 167 people lost their lives, with 700 more injured and thousands of others imperiled in a matter of minutes when the Big Top of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey circus went up in flames in Hartford, Connecticut. The Hartford circus fire was the kind of mass public event that was front-page news in newspapers across the United States. It remained in the news as the death toll rose. It was understood from the moment it happened as national news. “Big Top Bursts into Flame,” read the headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer. “5 Accused of Manslaughter as Circus Deaths Reach 139,” read the headline of the Passaic Herald-News. “Death Toll is 145 in Big Circus Fire,” reported Royal Oak’s Daily Tribune.

The circus itself was the kind of public event that would have been reported on in local papers, the rare public entertainment that received both AP and UP coverage, and so reporters were on the scene and captured pictures of terrified women and children running, with the flaming big top burning behind them. The scale of the human loss demanded investigation, immediately triggered criminal charges and individual lawsuits for injury and death.

In contrast, even where one incident involving a child burned in a cowboy suit in the same town or city followed closely on another that made the news, the connection went unexamined, unrecognized. In March 1945, the Yonkers Herald Statesman reported: “Two Young Boys Suffer Burns as Bonfires Set Clothing Afire.” The boys — ­five-year-old William Wetherell and four-year-old Guy Tortenson —­ had been injured in separate incidents, one day apart, in different parts of the borough. The common thread highlighted in the police report of the two incidents was boys and bonfires. The story and headline noted that their clothing caught fire; it did not note that both boys were wearing cowboy suits.

On Sunday, April 8, 1945, a double headline spanned the columns of page 1 of the Washington, DC, Times-Herald: patton seizes nazi gold hoard and yanks smash japs naval power. But just beneath these headlines, in columns 2 and 3, was an investigative report by Times-Herald journalists Roland Nicholson and Spence Drummond: d.c. parents warned: inflammable cowboy suits kill one child here, burn 7 and fuzzy ‘chaps’ flare like torches; stores are notified, probe launched. Here was what for so long had been lacking: a story clearly identifying the danger.

The opening sentence of the article noted that the chaps on the suit were “highly inflammable and capable in a split second of turning children into flaming torches.” Each of the children had been wearing the same outfit: a cowboy suit made by a New York firm, M.A. Henry Co., and sold under the trade name of Gene Autry. Tests by the DC fire marshal had determined  the “woolly material designed to simulate fur” to be highly inflammable.

The article identified the children by age and by when they were burned, and their parents by name and address: Tony DiTrapani, five, from Alexandria, who had died just a week ago; Arthur “Toby” Cumberledge, eight, burned on March 25; Lawrence Gates, seven, burned on February 11; Edward Bradley, six, burned six weeks ago; and Willie Wilks Jr., nine, “Negro,” burned on January 23, all being treated in Children’s Hospital; William “Billy” Greatorex, four, burned a year ago and still being treated twice weekly at the same hospital. It included pictures of several of the boys in the hospital and a family photo of Tony DiTrapani, who had died. The article also noted that the fire marshals’ investigation had begun “on the strength of an anonymous phone call in the latter part of March.” Both the Times-Herald reporters and the fire marshal had interviewed hospital officials and parents of the burned boys and in so doing alerted them that the tragedy that had befallen them was not just an accident.

The news report was more important because notice was all they could give. As the DC fire marshal noted in the article, “the District has no laws governing inflammable clothing.” They could investigate, alert parents, retailers, and the manufacturer —­ and they had. As the article noted, the store had immediately withdrawn the suits from sale. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association had notified local retailers and the National Association of Retail Credit Stores. Recalling the “circus tragedy” of a year ago, the paper suggested its reporting would add pressure to the demand for fireproofing of materials. But as the story noted, the danger likely was not confined to Washington, DC. “Because their trade name is that of a famous screen cowboy, it is likely that they are sold all over the country and that tragic experiences here have been duplicated many times over.”

For five straight days, the tragedy was major news in the nation’s capital. The Washington Post and the Washington Evening Star joined in covering the story, but it was the Times-Herald’s investigative reporting that really broke the story. Each day there were new details. More boys in the DC area had been injured; more boys had died. The potential scale of the tragedy grew as the Times-Herald revealed that the Henry Company claimed to have sold “some 200,000 of the suits to stores throughout the country.”

The Times-Herald called Gene Autry in Houston, where he was in the Air Transport Command. With headlines proclaiming, autry to probe fabric of togs bearing name and gene autry, movie star, will join probe, the Times-Herald reported that Autry had “expressed genuine distress,” said he would get in touch with Mr. Henry, and that he would do “‘anything I can for the children burned here.”

It mattered that the news had broken in the capital. The Bureau of Standards was based in Washington, DC, and S.H. Ingberg, chief of the fire resistance section, tested the “fur” chaps and confirmed the DC fire marshal’s assessment. The Merchants and Manufacturers Association and the American Retail Federation were based in Washington, DC. In its April 11 coverage, the Times-Herald reported that the associations’ warnings about the suits had gone out to retailers across the nation. And it mattered that the news had broken in Washington, DC, because congressmen were there and responded to the news. On the second day of the Times-Herald’s coverage, Democratic Representative John E. Rankin of Mississippi, on the floor of Congress, demanded an investigation, legislation, and possibly criminal action against the manufacturer. His words and demand for legislation too became part of the coverage.

Times-Herald reporter Roland Nicholson, reporting from New York, told his DC readers on April 10 that New York City’s fire marshal, Thomas P. Brophy, would conduct tests the next day of the suit. On April 11, the Times-Herald’s headline read, laguardia asks for full report on cowboy suits made in n.y. Nicholson described a test of the suit’s inflammability that newsmen made. They mounted a Gene Autry cowboy suit on a frame near the East River and then took a match to the lower edge of one leg of the chaps. With stop watches and cameras they captured the event. “Death Wears a Child’s Cowboy Suit … In Only 82 Seconds!” read the caption to the photo sequence of the burning suit. As Nicholson wrote, “It was not difficult to see that a child inside the suit would have been hopelessly trapped.” Spectators had gathered to watch. As the “intense flame totally consumed the garment,” Nicholson wrote, “a tenant woman … muttered ‘My God!’”

Timing is everything in what becomes news. And news or its absence in turn shapes the course of events, the course of lives. Late on the afternoon of April 12, 1945, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died. It is impossible to know how news coverage and in turn the hazard itself would have developed had Roosevelt not died when he did.

It seems possible, in at least some news markets, that other papers would have undertaken their own investigative reports on the cowboy suit hazard. As it was, they did not. The Philadelphia Inquirer had run a front-page story on April 12 reporting on the hazard, noting one boy in nearby Conshohocken, five-year-old David Speaker, who had died in January, and listing two New Jersey boys whom the Times-Herald’s coverage had highlighted as having been injured in Gene Autry cowboy suits. The Inquirer’s story alerted citizens of Philadelphia to the hazard, identifying the cowboy suit by name and describing it. But the story was not an investigative report. There was no follow-up. Had reporters for the Inquirer surveyed Philadelphia-area hospitals, they would have found at least four boys seriously burned in the last seven months in Gene Autry cowboy suit incidents who were still hospitalized. Only one of those incidents — Joseph Moore, burned in August 1944 — ­had made the news when it happened.

The New York City fire marshal’s investigation, announced just three days earlier, was also completed and submitted to Mayor LaGuardia on April 12. There clearly had been pressure to work quickly. The report was just over a page, less without its heading. It identified the M.A. Henry Co., with a showroom on Broadway in Manhattan and a factory in Passaic, New Jersey, as the manufacturer of the suit and the Woonsocket Falls Mill in Rhode Island as the source of the fabric, E.F. Timme & Son acting as sales agent. It confirmed the inflammability of the fabric: “It is a highly combustible material, easily ignited by an open flame or spark from a bonfire and it is particularly dangerous for children to wear cowboy or play suits trimmed with it. When this material is ignited, the flames spread with great rapidity.” As was true in Washington, DC, the fire marshal reported that “there is no City Ordinance or law prohibiting the manufacture, use or sale of this product.” The report included material misstatements of fact which could only have come from the principals themselves that downplayed the scale of the hazard. It stated that the Henry Co. had only used the rayon pile “for a brief period” and that it was “now using a material known as ‘Timme Tufts,’ a combination of alpaca and cotton, which is slow-burning.” The Henry Company never used Timme’s trademark fabric.

But perhaps most shocking of all was the confidently expressed statement, “There is no record of any death or injury by fire to a child in this City while wearing the subject play suit.” One wonders whether the fire marshal’s investigators in fact looked beyond their own records. They certainly had not checked area hospitals. Tommy McCormack lay at that moment hovering between life and death at Mt. Sinai Hospital. A boy named Michael Blessington had died in a New York City hospital less than two weeks before. Arnold Weinstein, a Brooklyn boy, remained in Long Island College Hospital, and William Wetherell, a Yonkers boy, was in St. John’s Hospital. And there were others.

But in a city the size of New York, even where the police or fire department were called, these incidents hardly had a chance of being “other than routine.” William Wetherell’s injuries, along with those of another boy, Guy Tortenson, had been reported in the Herald Statesman, but the report had not mentioned that the boys were wearing cowboy suits, and Yonkers fell outside the fire marshal’s jurisdiction. Neither the New York Herald Tribune nor any other daily in the city had reported the incidents in which Tommy McCormack, Michael Blessington, Arnold Weinstein, Dennis Duffy, or any of the other boys I know to have been injured in Gene Autry cowboy suits in the city were hurt.

Had President Roosevelt not died when he did, Mayor LaGuardia might have commented to the press on the report, and families of children who had been injured or died might have contacted the fire marshal or mayor’s office or a newspaper. But as it was, the report did not make the news. The day after receiving it, Mayor LaGuardia wrote to Representative Rankin sharing the substance of the investigation and noting that though there was no local law which would prohibit the sale of the cowboy suit in the city, “We have had no similar experience in New York City at any time.”

Reading the coverage in the Times-Herald from April 8 through April 12, it would be easy to believe that now everyone knew. And it seems likely that most adult residents of Washington, DC, did. Perhaps more so than in any other place in the United States, the adult population in the capital was attuned to the news. The Times-Herald had the highest circulation numbers of the four Washington, DC, dailies and broke the story on a Sunday, a day on which newspaper circulations were highest. Moreover, the Times-Herald’s investigative reporting expanded news coverage of the hazard beyond the capital. Its coverage was what had led to attention to the issue in Congress with a demand for investigation and legislation; it had triggered an investigation in Virginia; it had triggered Mayor LaGuardia’s demand for an investigation in New York City; it had triggered the warnings of national retailer organizations to their members. And because the news broke in Washington, DC, it was taken up by major newspapers that had their own news bureaus in the capital and by the AP and UP and reprinted in newspapers scattered across the U.S. The warnings by national retailer associations to their members undoubtedly saved many children’s lives as the outfits were taken off store shelves. Here was an instance where chains were a positive good. News, in this respect at least, reached into small markets it otherwise might not have reached. It was extended further by local chambers of commerce.

But despite all these things, outside Washington, DC, the news did not break for the vast majority of Americans in April 1945.

In the wake of President Roosevelt’s death, newspaper coverage of the hazard changed. But the reasons for that change went beyond Roosevelt’s death. The scope of the hazard itself changed. A week after the president’s death, the first hearing on inflammable fabrics, what would come to be called “flammable fabrics,” was held in the office of Representative J. Leroy Johnson (R–­ CA). In January, California had become the first state to consider and pass a state law making it unlawful to sell inflammable wearing apparel. The California law —­ spurred by an incident in the state’s capital, Sacramento, involving brushed rayon —­ targeted items made from synthetic fabrics: things like children’s bathrobes, shower curtains, and women’s evening gowns.

And just like that, the hazard of the Gene Autry cowboy suit was absorbed into a more generalized hazard, a broad field of inquiry that would require study and testing, the development of standards and testing equipment, all by experts in the textile field. A generalized inquiry was less attention-grabbing than headlines of burned children. Coverage would slip further back into newspapers, the sort of thing that might appear as a small item on a business page or not at all. The effect was something like that of an individual slipping into a crowd and disappearing.

During the war years, the circulation of newspapers had been at an all-time high. The total daily circulation of English-language daily newspapers in 1943 was well over 44 million. Circulation numbers remained high after the war. But circulation is not the same thing as reading. Reading did not mean every story. Then, as now, readers focused on different parts of the paper. And even as everyday life remained profoundly rooted in the local, news increasingly came from and was about somewhere else.

Knowing, too, is a complicated thing. A story about a boy fatally burned in a distant city or even a stranger in one’s own was tragic. It could call forth donations of money, blood, or even skin from strangers. But it was a story about an accident to one child. I suspect that even among those who may have read or heard something about some cowboy suit that had led to injuries, their knowing dimmed with the passage of time. Or with the belief that it had been a wartime thing of shoddy merchandise. Or with the assumption that the hazard had been addressed. Or with the notion that this is simply what happens when children play with fire. Readers did not have the opportunity you have had to see how coverage of this tragedy played out over time. There were no search engines. Nothing that collated news relating to particular topics. The newspaper went out with the trash. It was itself an ideal fire-­starter.

The news broke in a limited way, at a point when thousands, maybe several hundred thousand, of the suits had been sold. And in most places, there never was news at all about the hazard the Gene Autry cowboy suit posed. And so, it is unsurprising that long after April 1945, more children were burned in Gene Autry cowboy suits, and when those incidents were reported at all, they were stories of a tragedy to a local child and his family or some child in a distant city.

Excerpted from Writing with Fire: The Cowboy Suit Tragedy and the Course of a Life by Barbara Young Welke. © 2026 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Buy This Book

It all started a little before 5 pm on what was shaping up to be another comfortable Saturday of uncorked frivolity and champagne pours inside the lobster palace that patrons called “the new Shanley’s” on West 43rd Street (not to be confused with “the old one,” its slightly less gilded predecessor below 42nd Street). The uptown spot was a favorite for New York’s mayors, business magnates, and celebrities, and a frequent stop for visiting politicians and presidents. It had also become a social hall for the senior New York Times staff and executives who worked down the street. That’s why the Times’s senior editor Charles Willis Thompson was settling in for dinner with his wife, kids, and the families of other Times reporters, when restaurant manager Johnny Butler rushed toward him. Trying not to alarm the other guests, Butler directed him to the kitchen for an urgent call. A heartbeat later, Thompson burst back, shrugged into his coat, and told his wife to take the children home — now.

Further downtown, in the city’s garment district, a large group had gathered on the already busy street outside of the Asch Building, a towering ten-story high-rise of iron and steel. Young garment workers from neighboring factories stood paralyzed in disbelief as a blur of people rushed in from every direction to join the swelling crowd of New Yorkers staring up, their eyes fixed on the flames engulfing the tower’s top three floors, home to the Triangle Shirtwaist factory.

The factory employed hundreds of immigrant women, mostly in their teens and early twenties, working long hours to make the clothes worn by the city’s upper class. Everyone in New York had heard at least something about their struggle: years of pickets and arrests, beatings and jail in their fight for a safer workplace. And everyone on the street understood, with a sick certainty, that they were still up there.

At the top of the building, a hundred feet in the sky, the crowd could see the young girls in painful clarity as they frantically paced near the ledge and shouted from the windows. With the factory floor doors locked to prevent the women from stealing fabric or taking unscheduled bathroom breaks, there was no way out. A young journalist named Bill Shepherd, who had just recently moved to New York from the Midwest, was among the first on the scene after spotting the smoke during his walk in the park.

In every window frame he could see young women, as alive as he was, waving their arms and screaming “Call the firemen!” and “Get a ladder!” After finding his voice, he joined others in pleading for the workers to “Stay there!” and “Don’t jump!” They assured the women that help was coming.

Before the first fire engine arrived, one young girl climbed onto the ledge, fought off those trying to hold her back, and stepped off. Shepherd turned away before she hit the ground, but he forgot to cover his ears. “I learned a new sound,” he would recall. “A more horrible sound than description can picture.” Realizing the enormity of what was taking place, and that no other journalist or city official had arrived yet, he began to write down everything he could see. The chaos and the order. He noted the way some women would watch their friends jump as they patiently waited for their turn. In one broken-out window, he could see a young man in a long coat and tan shoes, his hat still on his head, helping young women over the ledge, one at a time.

“He held her out, deliberately away from the building and let her drop,” he wrote.

Then came a second girl. And a third.

“They were as unresisting as if he were helping them onto a streetcar.” When the fourth girl stepped into the frame, she wrapped her arms around the man and gave him a kiss before he held her gently over the ledge and let go. Then, he was in the air after her.

There have been few moments in American history that can be so specifically pinpointed as forever changing the character of the nation. The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire was one of those moments, but not only for the reason most think. The dominant histories of the fire focus on its role in inspiring some of the country’s first labor standards and protections, transforming the world of the American worker. The standard bearers — Leon Stein’s The Triangle Fire and David Von Drehle’s Triangle — tell that story with authority: a calamity that became a catalyst, law rising from smoke. What is less well known is that the fire also provided the definitive spark in the rise and industrialization of modern charity in the United States, a watershed moment that instantly recast a group of wealthy bankers and social elites as experts on social problems. And that long buried legacy — popularizing charity as a professionalized industry — has shaped the prevailing path through which the country meets issues of social crisis and poverty ever since, leading it away from the true drivers of its most persistent challenges. It’s a more complicated story, but, in our moment, as consequential.

Before the fire, support for workers, the poor, and marginalized communities in New York — and in the rest of the country — was typically exercised through religious institutions, union coalitions and acts of mutual aid, voluntary associations, municipal relief, and giving support directly to individuals and groups in need. There would be occasional campaigns in the newspapers for specific causes — like tuberculosis stamps, or in response to war and disaster — but they were always one-off efforts, centered on temporary emergency-relief goals. It wasn’t until the months after the fire that the attributes of modern charity as a profession were widely articulated to a large audience of Americans, through an unprecedented partnership between the city’s largest charities and the New York Times.

With the ire of the working class directly focused on a New York elite who had spent years ignoring their strikes and union efforts to create safer work environments, the city’s middle and upper classes desperately searched for a pathway to do something. Seeing the opportunity in front of them, Edward Devine, a key leader of New York’s largest charity, and the state’s other big charity bosses seized the moment, leveraging their connections to advance a new charity vision they had struggled to mainstream in the preceding years.

The Times got involved because it too was compelled by an urge to do something. In the years before the fire, the Times made its fortune as the polished voice of New York’s big business merchants and magnates — defending department stores and garment manufacturers with the same certainty it turned against the women and unions who marched for years beneath the Triangle’s windows calling for safer work conditions. The formula worked: ads swelled, circulation climbed, and the paper’s influence hardened into a loyal readership in the city’s wealthiest homes. The fire changed everything. Overnight, the Times found itself inside the story — derided in speeches and jeered on picket lines. As New Yorkers looked for culprits in the greatest industrial tragedy in the city’s history, the elite and their favorite newspaper were placed front and center. The Times responded with a pivot. It urged the city to put aside blame and give — to a small, hand-picked group of charities, the ones governed by the same families who filled its society pages.

Relief for the surviving families of the fire came first. And then a groundbreaking new campaign between the Times and the charities was announced: hundreds of stories and editorials aimed at convincing New Yorkers to support a completely new industry of “scientific charity.” Day after day, the Times urged readers that they could do more “good” if they refrained from giving money to the individuals and unions they found in the streets and instead gave to “professional” organizations — the city’s biggest charities — who, the newspaper proclaimed, had experts trained in helping those in need and solving their problems.

“The first kindly impulse” is to give directly to people in need, but “that would be what may be called ‘the old charity,’” attested the Times editorial board in 1912, “and it would doubtless have its reward, but modern philanthropy always distrusts and often denies the efficacy of such giving, and strongly inclines to the belief that it does more harm than good.” Instead, the Times instructed readers that they should direct their support to a select group of elite charity institutions — three organizations, to be exact — led by the city’s wealthiest bankers and society members. Rather than looking to the unions and community organizations that were starting to gain steam in America, the Times redirected the country’s attention to a more “scientific” and “efficient” approach. Modern charity, established the Times, “must be largely the work of salaried officials of various grades, specifically trained for it and devoting all their time to it.” In a decade marked by the creation of several powerful private foundations — including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, in 1911, and the Rockefeller Foundation, in 1913 — along with new legislation, in 1917, that provided tax deductions for charitable giving for the first time, it was this partnership with the Times shortly after a fire in 1911 that was the most formative moment in the history of modern charity in America. The country was told that with enough donations, the city’s new charities would be able to fix the social and economic conditions responsible for the fire and the other inequities of life at the turn of the 20th century.

These unrealized assurances, like the fire, would soon be forgotten, but what remained at the core of the charities’ “new vision” was a generation of Americans who were taught to fear the extreme violence, sickness, and economic burden that the poor — primarily recently-arrived immigrant workers — posed to their way of life. While the “old” vision of charity favored poorhouses and models of direct giving, such as soup kitchens and outdoor relief efforts, its critics argued that it didn’t adequately target the systemic structures that contributed to poverty. For instance, many new charity proponents argued that the prevailing “old” forms of charity underestimated the impact of open immigration policies. Rather than taking bold moves to curb immigration and address the true causes of social ills, older models of giving were only adding to the number of “defectives, delinquents, and dependents” in the country, as one widely circulated New York charity pamphlet put it.

“American standards,” wrote Devine, one of New York’s most influential supporters of a new charity industry and co-founder of the field of social work, “are gravely imperiled by the annual addition of an unsifted million of newcomers whose standards are different from ours.” In an effort to raise public urgency and funding for new charity interventions, Devine and the new charity bosses led the country in drumming up fake science and alarming narratives about how the scores of new immigrants arriving in unprecedented numbers to New York were somehow more prone to disease, crime, and poverty than native New Yorkers. It should be an urgent duty of all who care about America, Devine implored in a February 1911 issue of the New York charity sector’s most popular newsletter, to protect the country from the threat that the new arrivals posed to the heritage and well-being of the nation:

We do have a right to assert vigorously the value of our national heritage, and, though it may seem old-fashioned to say it, we do have a sacred duty to transmit it unimpaired — which is not to say unchanged — to our posterity. To some extent this heritage is one of race. Its creators gave it to us with their blood. It has been enriched by many crossings of races, but biologists tell us that mingling within limits is beneficial, beyond those limits productive only of a mongrel and degenerate breed. Let no one read into this expression of national responsibility for American standards a shred of bigotry or prejudice against any of the peoples of the earth. Modern social ideals are neither provincial nor sectarian. It is precisely because of a passionate attachment to the true interests of humanity that social workers may look with profound distrust upon the demand for cheap immigrant labor. Genuine humane sentiment is not inconsistent with the maintenance of community and national standards.

Convincing lawmakers, religious leaders, politicians, and the wider public that the well-being of the country was fundamentally linked to its ability to control the types of immigrants who were allowed entry, the charities popularized the 20th-century specter of the dangerous immigrant and fostered a climate of deep concern over the harm that new arrivals were causing to the stability of the nation. The charities funded and championed the early work of eugenicists, lobbied for the administration of the country’s first literacy, psychological, and intelligence exams at its ports of entry, advanced the country’s first immigrant quota legislation, and led all public actors in supporting the forced institutionalization and sterilization of those new arrivals and other lower-class individuals deemed “feeble-minded” or otherwise harmful to the heritage and safety of the country. In so doing, their influence extended far beyond New York — shaping federal and state legislation and campaigns that resulted in the forced sterilization, removal, and institutionalization of untold thousands.

It’s difficult to underestimate the “new charity” bosses’ role in shaping the thinking and policies of their era and the last century of American life. The ideas and racist science they fostered and mainstreamed served as the underpinning for the 1917 and 1924 Immigration Acts, the most restrictive immigration laws in the country’s history, as well as the mass deportation campaigns of President Herbert Hoover in the 1920s and ’30s and the forced removal and internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, through McCarthyism in the 1950s, and they still echo in the 21st-century rhetoric and actions of Donald Trump’s first and second presidential campaigns and terms.

Modern charity in America was never intended to serve as a separate entity from the city’s ruling power brokers; it was always an extension of their influence. Despite its roots in a progressive movement, the move toward “new charity” intentionally silenced the ideas of labor organizers, social reformers, and unions who confronted the charity kings after the fire and who tried to turn the tragedy into a moment of accountability and new rights for immigrant workers and families.

At the center of the erasure of labor leaders and the rise of the immigrant-fear-mongering charity organizations was New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, who brought the paper from the brink of bankruptcy to global prominence. Few people have heard of the man who created the Times. Even in historian circles, he plays more of a cameo role in books on journalism. More often, it’s the sensationalism-driven battles between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst that chapter this period for most readers of media history. There are no movies about Adolph Ochs starring Humphrey Bogart or Robert Redford, and he wasn’t a big enough blip on the national radar to catch the eye of an Orson Welles. This isn’t because Ochs was less interesting; rather, he was a master at the art of deflection, always working to direct attention away from himself and to the arrangements and matters he wanted people to see.

During the years of Pulitzer and Hearst, it was Ochs who created an institution that became the gold standard for journalism around the world, putting the star newspapers of both titans out of business within his own lifetime. In a personal letter, Walter Lippmann, one of the 20th century’s most influential writers on journalism and public opinion, told Ochs late in his life that he considered him alone as “the greatest” journalist in history and “the Times newspaper as the most constructive achievement in the journalism of the whole world.” Ochs is considered by many historians to be the father of journalistic objectivity, and every publisher of the Times since the 1890s has been a direct descendant or relative of his.

And yet, despite all his achievements, there is nothing that brought the publisher more pride than the alliance he built between the Times and the country’s largest charities after the fire; an arrangement which helped both industries climb to heights that only Ochs could have imagined. While the promise, of using charitable donations to solve poverty, made by Ochs and the charity kings, has long since evaporated, the reflex they ingrained in Americans — to uncritically turn toward charity at the sight of uncomfortable news — remains one of the most misunderstood and consequential legacies in the country’s history.

Excerpted from Fire in the Heart of the City by David Conrad-Pérez. Copyright © 2026 by David Conrad-Pérez. Used by permission of the publisher, New York University Press. 

Buy This Book

The problem of the masher was not unique to Chicago. When the Tribune published its exposé on the Palmer House block masher, the nation was in the throes of what some newspapers were calling the “crusades” against mashers. Local and national press took notice of the masher from his first inception in the 1880s, but coverage of mashing skyrocketed in the first years of the 20th century, peaking in the mid-1910s. By the late 1890s and into the next decade, mashing was a subject of public debate and outrage across the country. Though one Wisconsin paper described the masher as “an evil belonging to larger cities,” medium- and small-sized towns were by no means immune to mashing. Towns as small as Mount Vernon, Iowa (population 1,532 in 1910), had a masher problem large enough to warrant consideration of an antimashing ordinance. It seemed no place was safe from the masher.

Americans reserved the moniker of “masher” primarily, if not exclusively, for white men, making the antimasher crusades a significant, if short-lived, challenge to white men’s dominance in public space. Women’s rights activists were particularly forceful in their critiques of mashing, pointing out that white men who mashed betrayed a sense of entitlement over women’s bodies. White women insisted that mashing made a laughingstock of the idea that white men were their natural protectors. White men were the primary perpetrators of intrusive behaviors, they argued, so how could they rely on those same men to defend them from sexual violence in public?

At the end of the 19th century, white Americans emphasized self-restraint and temperance as ideal qualities of “civilized” white “manliness,” while progressives like Theodore Roosevelt increasingly emphasized athleticism, militarism, and ruggedness as the key to saving middle- and upper-class white men from effeminacy and weakness. The masher embodied neither of these competing masculine models. Rather, he represented much that was potentially harmful or ridiculous about uncontrolled white masculinity. The masher was lascivious and unrestrained, even effeminate, more interested in appeasing his vanity and following his sexual desires than practicing either the cool self-control or rugged self-sufficiency that many white Americans saw as essential elements of masculinity.

The legal response to mashing began as early as the 1880s when zealous police officers started arresting mashers in places like Chicago and St. Louis using existing disturbance of the peace ordinances. At least 25 municipalities went on to consider new antimashing laws, to revise laws to include mashing behaviors, or to direct courts and law enforcement to reinterpret existing ordinances in order to arrest mashers. Houston was the first major city to implement a stand-alone antimashing ordinance when the city council passed a ban on “goo goo eyes” in 1905. Soon after, the mastermind of the Houston ordinance, T.H. Stone, was advising other cities on how to develop their own antimashing ordinances. By 1921, at least 15 towns and cities had officially passed new or revised ordinances designed to combat mashing. Such ordinances, as the Detroit Free Press put it, were designed to give police the “utmost power” in arresting mashers.

Antimashing ordinances and crackdowns were a response to critiques from urban reformers, women’s rights activists, and Progressive politicians of the time who couched the mashing crisis in the context of their larger reform efforts. For instance, Chicago’s Juvenile Protective Agency suggested that strengthening laws against rape and seduction, a key goal of many women’s rights activists, would also protect women from mashers’ random assaults on the street. In places where school-age girls were targets of intrusive behaviors, some boards of education suggested using new age-of-consent laws to prosecute the men who hung around schools and waited to accost young girls who emerged at the end of the day. Other places, like New York City, tackled mashing by expanding vagrancy or “move-on” ordinances that were designed to clear the streets of anyone deemed undesirable or unsightly. However, arrests under vagrancy laws were vulnerable to dismissal in court, leading Theodore Roosevelt, noted Progressive and then-governor of New York, to call on the state legislature to explicitly ban mashing in 1900.

While antimashing laws and police crackdowns appeased activists, they did not guarantee that mashers were arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced smoothly or to constituents’ satisfaction. Despite the groundswell of support for tougher responses to mashing, when police began arresting white men for mashing and courts began fining them, they were sometimes met with resistance. In an early example from 1887, a justice in the New York police court who had fined a man ten dollars for “insulting and annoying School Girls” found himself on the receiving end of criticism from local reporters. He defended his decision to Mayor Abram Hewitt by asserting, “I will mete out such punishment as I think the case warrants, even should I displease the Reporter of the ‘World.’” On the other hand, if residents complained about troublesome sections of town or thoroughfares that were popular with mashers, there was no guarantee that the police would take these complaints seriously. A New York resident reported to local law enforcement that a particular Harlem bridge was often lined with “tramps, drunken loafers, and ribald young men” that made crossing unpleasant. According to the resident, “Women and young girls make its passage only at the expense of lewd glances, insulting words, and indecent jostlings.” When a police officer investigated, he found this description to be “utterly untrue” and took no action.

White citizens also used disorderly conduct and antimashing sentiment to try to clear the streets of anyone but themselves and thus to assert their dominance over public spaces. For example, an anonymous New York resident asked the police to clear his neighborhood of “alot of colored would be dudes who congregate in this block.” These men blocked the sidewalks, he alleged, and “there is no white lady passing through there that is not insulted.” This attempt to rile up New York City law enforcement fell flat. The local police captain who investigated the complaint reported that “147 colored families” lived in the neighborhood and acknowledged that these Black families were “nearly if not quite all respectable and … entitled to some privileges on the street and sidewalks where they live.” However, complaints like this, which appealed to white supremacist beliefs about the inherent innocence of white womanhood and the inherent brutality of Black masculinity, were a major reason why Black Americans and Black women’s clubs rarely supported the expansion of police power to crack down on sexual violence, fearing new laws would be used to target Black men and protect only white women.

When law enforcement and judges chose to crack down on mashing, they soon encountered another problem: the reluctance of women to report and testify against mashers. In 1901, Chicago Chief of Police Francis O’Neill practically begged women to come forward with charges against mashers. “While of course I know that the masher is more or less annoying to women, no complaints have been made to me,” he explained to the Chicago Daily Tribune. “I do not see how we can do much unless complaints are handed in.” City officials’ frustrations led some to blame women for the mashing problem. W.L. Bodine, a superintendent in the Chicago public school system, argued the city “would be ridden of mashers if women would be brave enough” to alert the police and testify in court. “The entire question of checking mashers,” Bodine insisted, “is up to Chicago womanhood.”

Women had good reason to fear the notoriety that could come with testifying against mashers. Women who accused men of mashing regularly found themselves blamed for the men’s behaviors. Some judges went so far as to suggest that women accused mashers to get their “names and pictures in the newspapers.” In other cases, women found themselves on trial for their conduct. A New York woman confronted a display of white male solidarity when she tried to turn a masher in to the police. When asked to account for his actions, the masher had asked the policeman, “You can dope what she is, can’t you? Why, she gimme the lamp!” To translate, the masher accused the woman of looking at him and, thus, encouraging him. The white police officer sided with the masher and told the woman to “beat it.” Similarly, near the end of the antimashing crusades, a woman brought a case against a man who she said pinched her leg in a movie theater. By the end of the court proceedings, the accused had been freed and his accuser had herself been charged with disorderly conduct. The man claimed she had been the one who rubbed his leg, not the other way around. Black women may have been especially nervous that such a fate might befall them. The relative paucity of Black women’s accounts of mashing in Progressive Era newspapers may be in part the result of their anxieties about being labeled sexually immoral if they came forward with stories of sexual violence. Indeed, the white press often portrayed white women accusers as sexually suspect or immoral — suggesting that white women’s fashions were too “extreme” or their glances too inviting — so it would not be surprising if Black women feared the same and worse.

Still, there are examples of Black women demanding legal and state protection from white mashers. In 1924, the Chicago Defender reported that Estelle Richardson, “a musician and a young woman of culture,” confronted a white masher on a New York subway car. The man, John Elliot, “attempted to flirt” with Richardson on the subway and made “insulting remarks.” When she rebuffed his advances, Elliot threatened, “If you were in Georgia, I would have you strung up.” Richardson quickly left the train and managed to grab Elliot, with the help of a white female passenger, and held him until police came to arrest him. Elliot was sentenced to the workhouse, and the judge who oversaw the sentencing congratulated Richardson on her “pluck.” Despite the positive feedback from the court, Elliot’s reaction to Richardson’s rebuke highlights the cost Black women faced if they reported white mashers. Elliot’s choice of words alluded to lynching, reflecting the way white men’s sexual insinuations in public were also racialized when they targeted Black women. Reports of Elliot’s violent threats could have convinced other Black women it was better to ignore insults from white men than reprimand them publicly.

As it became clear that white men, whether policemen or strangers on the street, could not be relied on to protect white women, let alone women of color, women began to argue for taking matters into their own hands. Prominent clubwomen in some cities called on law enforcement to enlist women to help catch and arrest mashers. Cities like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Pittsburgh hired women as decoys to entrap mashers on the street. By 1915, several cities had hired or were considering hiring women as official police officers with the ability to arrest mashers on the spot. While most of the first women police officers were white, Black communities in the urban North also called on police departments to employ Black women as police officers in hopes they could better protect African American women from urban dangers. As the Chicago Defender explained in 1914, Black women police officers would be able to “mingle with the crowds on the street, in the cars, in the public and private parks and places of amusement to protect the women of the race from those who go beyond ‘mashing’ and insult the girls and women of the race.” By the late 1920s, Black policewomen were reportedly helping to investigate vice in dance halls in New York, patrolling the West Park district of Chicago in an attempt to eradicate mashers, and arresting white men who bothered Black women on streetcars in Washington, DC.

When all else failed, women turned to self-defense tactics to protect themselves from mashers and assaults on the street. Historian Wendy Rouse suggests self-defense became “a means for white women to empower themselves against their alleged natural protectors — white men.” As one Los Angeles woman put it after she attacked a would-be masher, “I didn’t see anyone to protect me, so I protected myself.” White male–owned newspapers did not always take their efforts seriously, gleefully reporting how women stuck mashers with hatpins, hit them with umbrellas, and even used their fists or martial arts like jiujitsu. Still, working-class women particularly embraced self-defense to combat mashers. For instance, Chicago’s Day Book celebrated the strength, bravery, and quick-wittedness of working women who physically fought off unwanted advances. As one young telephone operator argued, she had no qualms about “smashing her handbag” over a masher’s head and “pummeling him with her fists.” Black women also sometimes found that only they could save themselves from white mashers. In 1928, as the antimashing crusades had all but disappeared, the Chicago Defender cheered Helen Waters, who “battered” a white masher’s “face and body” when he touched her knee in an insulting gesture. While these piecemeal, individual responses to mashing may not have had long-lasting effects on mashing’s prominence, they do confirm the numbers and varieties of women who denounced mashing as an inappropriate display of masculine entitlement.

While none of the tactics for eradicating the masher’s intrusive behaviors proved entirely successful, the nationwide organized response to mashing was unique to the Progressive Era. At no time in the United States before or since has there been such a widespread condemnation of men’s stranger intrusions or such a robust set of legal and extralegal frameworks for addressing those behaviors.

From Watching the Girls Go By: A History of Street Harassment in the United States by Molly M. Brookfield. Copyright © 2026 by Molly M. Brookfield. Used by permission of the publisher, the University of North Carolina Press. 

Buy This Book

Watching the mourners with concern was a twenty-four-year-old Black nurse, Sarah Kee. She knew what had caused the infants’ deaths: understaffing. Kee had realized the danger months earlier when she was scrambling to keep an eye on a crowded ward and found a mother obliviously feeding a baby contaminated milk. Kee and other nurses often had to tend forty-five babies at once, they wrote in a letter to New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia that October, making it impossible to care for them properly or self-sanitize after handling sick ones.

Their letter was not LaGuardia’s first warning about the hospital. The previous year, he had appointed a commission to examine it as part of an effort to uncover the “social and economic conditions” that had sparked violent riots in Harlem. Investigators found rotten meat in refrigerators and roaches and rubbish scattered across the kitchens. “Bloody operations” on adults occasionally had to be done in the children’s ward due to space constraints. The 325-bed facility sometimes hosted up to 450 patients, forcing some to sleep on chairs. Those who couldn’t climb stairs traveled between floors in a garbage elevator, because the regular one was broken.

Racist policies exacerbated the health risks for Black medical staff. The citywide practice of assigning Black student nurses to lengthy stints in tuberculosis wards, for example, led one in seven to catch the illness. “Discrimination against the Negro Nurse has gone so far,” wrote LaGuardia’s commissioners, “that they are forced to work under conditions which constantly endanger their health, even their lives.” The commission was not reassured when the man responsible for overseeing the city’s hospitals, Sigismund Goldwater, responded that every minority group was subjected to racial prejudice, “and has been for all time.”

His attitude infuriated Kee, who was then working in a “no-return unit” of terminally ill tuberculosis patients: a treacherous job for a slight woman of ninety-six pounds, given the disease’s greater lethality among underweight individuals. When she heard Goldwater imply in a public meeting that Black staff were destined to contract tuberculosis more than their white counterparts, Kee remembered in an interview decades later, she stood up and declared that she now understood why she had been placed in the unit: “‘You wanted to be sure that’s what I was going to die of—isn’t it so!’” Her words garnered applause, and results. Days after her stand, she was transferred to a different ward.

LaGuardia never published his own commission’s findings. Goldwater stayed in power. So did a Harlem Hospital board member whose “racial attitude,” the commissioners wrote, “like that of Hitler towards the Jews, causes him to ignore and belittle the scientific ability of medical men who are black.”

The hospital’s Jewish and Black staff had also noticed parallels in the prejudiced treatment they received. As she learned about Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies from European colleagues, Kee began to realize how U.S. state-sponsored racism similarly enabled violence. “We only knew the Ku Klux Klan was killing people like us, and we had never put them together with the government” and the anti-Black discrimination it enforced, she recalled in the interview decades later. “So now we’re matching what’s happening in Germany to the Jews ... to what’s happening to us here in the United States.”

When the 1936 diarrhea outbreak struck, Kee saw the hospital’s racist machinery in motion again. In “cause of death” reports sent to the city each month, she discovered, many of the infant fatalities were being attributed to syphilis and gonorrhea: a lie that obscured the understaffing problem and fed stereotypes about Black people being prone to venereal disease. Nor had conditions improved for most of the staff. A few months after the babies’ deaths, prominent Harlem dentist Arnold Donawa accused Goldwater of “criminal negligence amounting to murder” when thirty-four Black nurses with influenza were denied treatment at their own workplace.

Kee and Donawa were allies not only in the fight to improve Harlem Hospital but also in efforts to alleviate suffering abroad. A cerebral, bespectacled oral surgeon from Trinidad, Donawa had been the first Black dean of Howard University’s dental school before opening a private practice in New York. He and Kee got acquainted through United Aid for Ethiopia, a coalition that formed in the lead-up to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s October 1935 invasion of the East African nation. In January 1936, weeks after LaGuardia’s commission finished its report on the abysmal conditions at Harlem Hospital, the group fundraised and shipped an entire field hospital to Ethiopia: a tent as long as a basketball court; fifty cots and mattresses; and assorted linens, blankets, and bandages.

LaGuardia, meanwhile, attended a pro-Mussolini Madison Square Garden rally to raise funds for Italy. When the crowd clamored for a speech, he declared their cause “quite just,” praised the “loyalty” of Italian Americans, and lauded “the tradition of our country to send help wherever help is needed.” The mayor also promised not to let the city become a “battleground of racial antagonisms”—an apparent reference to the groundswell of Black support for Ethiopia. Donawa fired back in an open letter, telling LaGuardia his attendance had earned the “justified indignation of the Negro masses of Harlem and other sections of New York City.”

Kee started to see more clearly how Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, Hitler’s persecution of European Jews, and anti-Black racism in the United States were entwined. A new international consciousness of oppression unfolded in her mind, she explained in the interview decades later:

We called what was happening to us discrimination, because we were colored, and we thought that was the only thing that’d happened in the world … But they called it fascism. So then we said “fascism,” and included everybody in the world, not just the Black people.

The ramifications of this emerging intersectionality were also expansive. In Alabama, five Black Americans were arrested for boycotting Italian American-owned stores. Two months later, a historian visiting the state on behalf of a relief group told churchgoers that Black Americans “may be forced to use Ethiopia and her emergency as a means toward their own salvation.”

Thousands volunteered to fight for Ethiopia, and Emperor Haile Selassie said he “welcomed” American recruits, prompting the US Justice Department to issue a reminder that the Neutrality Act of 1794 still banned American citizens from enlisting with foreign powers to fight nations with whom the United States was at peace. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a second Neutrality Act into law a few weeks after an Ethiopia solidarity rally drew 25,000 onto the streets in Harlem, empowering himself to ban Americans from exporting “implements of war” to warring countries or traveling on “vessels of belligerent nations.” In his August 1936 “Good Neighbor” speech, Roosevelt vowed the United States would “shun political commitments which might entangle us in foreign wars.”

Kee, however, wanted to volunteer as a field nurse for a cause within the United States. In January 1937, rain pounded her home state of Ohio for twelve days, generating historic floods that killed 350 and left an estimated 1 million Americans homeless. A Red Cross flyer appeared on the Harlem Hospital bulletin board one morning, summoning healthcare workers to the destruction zone. Kee and some of her colleagues went to sign up, but the relief group accepted only the white volunteers, telling Kee they had no place for her. When she returned to the hospital, deflated, a doctor drew her attention to another opportunity posted on the same board: a call for medical volunteers to go to Spain.

At United Aid for Ethiopia, Donawa had already told Kee about General Francisco Franco’s July coup attempt against the democratically elected government of Spain. She had started paying closer attention in September, when Mussolini sent Italian troops to support the ongoing insurgency. The conflict now came into focus for Kee as the most accessible bulwark against the tide of oppression she saw surging across the world. “I knew what had happened in Germany, and I could see this coming all the way to America,” Kee recalled in the interview decades later. “‘It’s going to be fascism if you don’t get out there and fight.’”

By mid-March, the Medical Bureau of the American Friends of Spanish Democracy had approved Kee as a qualified volunteer. She was booked for passage on a ship along with twelve other recruits and $10,000 in medical supplies that an American doctor already stationed in Spain had requested. The Bureau’s press release about Kee’s unit — the third group it had dispatched so far — referred to her as the “first Negro nurse to be sent to Spain.”

On March 27, 1937, Kee stepped onto the SS Paris and set sail from Manhattan’s West 48th Street pier. An article about her journey appeared that day in the New York Amsterdam News, the city’s oldest Black newspaper, describing her as a “slim, brownskin miss, with soft eyes and an appealingly demure expression,” unruffled by the danger awaiting her. Kee told the reporter she hoped to “encourage Negroes to do more for the sake of democracy, to show my own people that there is something more we can do and to prove that we have a place in the world.” But, she said, her primary aim was to “help the injured people.”

From the start, Kee’s sincerity would be challenged. A few weeks after her arrival, the US consul general in Barcelona warned the secretary of state that the medical units had gone to Spain “not from purely humanitarian motives, but with the primary purpose of assisting one of the opposing parties to win the war.” Their presence, the diplomat complained, had fostered “the belief that there is a bit of a sham about the ‘complete neutrality of America.’” A State Department lawyer forwarded the information to the U.S. attorney general several weeks later, for “such inquiry as you may deem it advisable to make.”

Kee was attacked by some allies of her cause. The first person to denounce her after she joined the brigade was a fellow medical volunteer in her unit. When she entered the ship’s dining room the first night, Dr. Donald Pitts, a surgeon from Oklahoma, refused to sit at the same table with her. In two separate interviews decades later — by which time Kee had changed her name to Salaria Kea — she recounted his exact words: “‘I have never sat at the table with a [N-word] wench, and I’m not going to start now.’”

One interviewer asked Kea what it made her think when, en route to fight fascism, she encountered such rank bigotry among her own comrades. “Nothing,” Kea replied. “I could see that’s the world. See, I knew America. I knew he was a Southerner.”

“Didn’t it make you worry that the people who were going to fight fascism were racist?” the interviewer asked.

No, Kea said, that was “just the way it was.”

“Were you disgusted?” the interviewer pressed.

“Look, doll, if I turned around and hated everybody that did anything to me, I wouldn’t be here,” Kea explained patiently. “I’d be dead. Or in a mental institution.”

Excerpted from Americans Without Borders: The Radical Activists Who Fought for US Ideals Abroad While Facing Political Persecution at Home by Julia Harte, published by Redwood Press, an imprint of Stanford University Press, © 2026 by Julia Katherine Harte. All Rights Reserved.

Buy This Book

And yet there is one aspect of the historian’s craft that overlaps with the realm of genius: the art of writing. Given the centrality of writing to the way historians think and share their knowledge, it is surprising how little training they get: most historians do not get lessons in how to write, except perhaps in their earliest student years. The focus is more often on the quality of research or the depth of knowledge. In some countries, this means that historical writing has a reputation for being tedious, descriptive, and excessively wordy. Britain is a partial exception to this rule. An obsession with strict word counts and a culture of accessible writing means that many British historians are encouraged to write in a way that might appeal to a wider audience. 

Even so, the stylistic under­pinnings of history writing are rarely treated in detail; at best, it is left to reviewers to comment on whether a par­ticu­lar book or essay “reads” well. While this might be justified for those who have little interest in perfecting their writing, there are many cases where it matters in a very profound way. One such case is clearly Hobsbawm, whose genius, insofar as it existed, was closely tied to his ability to write in a way that simplified highly complex pro­cesses without making any concessions to superficiality. He was not a narrative historian. He did not tell scintillating, swashbuckling stories of historical figures, nor did he paint dramatic pictures of people, places, or landscapes. His talent lay in dissecting contexts and ordering material. He had, as fellow historian Asa Briggs put it in 1964, an incessant “desire to ‘place’ and order every historical phenomenon” combined with a “crisp and economical style, with a suggestion of immense reserve power behind the most elegant phraseology.”

We can learn a lot about Hobsbawm’s approach to writing by looking closely at his Ages series of historical textbooks. In 2002, the well-­known British Left intellectual, Perry Anderson, attempted a panoramic assessment of the Ages series, and he remarked on how few people had taken on this task: “If the three Ages enjoy a well-nigh universal admiration, they have attracted less critical discussion than they deserve, as often happens in such cases. This is partly a matter of the scale of their performance, which virtually defies any all-­round view of them. Lacking that, par­tic­u­lar points of dissent or reflection are bound to remain somewhat arbitrary or marginal.” Anderson was right. While there was a plethora of reviews of each Ages book at the time of its publication, there were — and are — hardly any critical essays that deal with the entire series. Successive generations of reviewers have attempted to pierce the veneer of Hobsbawm’s analy­sis, but they have generally been reduced to airing minor historiographical disagreements or indulging in political polemic, neither of which seem adequate responses to one of the most formidable attempts to write the history of the modern world in the English language. 

Nor have Hobsbawm’s critics succeeded in blunting the impact of his books. The Ages series was far and away his biggest-selling publishing venture, with paperback copies gracing the shelves of hundreds of thousands of homes all over the world. It was not without reason that a journalist for The Observer wryly remarked in September 1985 that The Age of Revolution and The Age of Capital had become “part of the mental furniture of educated Englishmen” —­ and this was before the publication of the two final volumes, which were even more successful. The Ages series have cast their own shadow: so many of us have read them that it is difficult to see them as anything other than a completed edifice that has always existed.

Take The Age of Revolution, for instance, which was published in 1962. This would eventually become the first volume of the Ages series, but, at the time of publication, it seemed to come out of nowhere, a Marxist bolt from the blue, written by a rising star of the Left. Yet the ideas that underpinned it did not fall out of the sky. They were built on Hobsbawm’s reading and teaching since the mid-1940s. This was the mental world from which The Age of Revolution was born. 

Let us begin with pedagogy. Hobsbawm believed passionately that his vocation was to communicate and educate through the written word. From his earliest teenage writings, everything was mediated through text. He wrote quickly, fluently, and often in one take. Regardless of the subject matter, the words poured onto the page. At no point in his career does he seem to have suffered from serious writer’s block. He continued to write even through some of his most difficult personal circumstances. Writing was more than a by-product of an intellectual life; it was the primary means of sharing ideas and insights with the world beyond academia. This was crucial because, like many other postwar British left-wing intellectuals, Hobsbawm wanted to communicate with a wider audience. He put this clearly in a long interview in 1978:

It is very impor­tant to write history for people other than pure academics … Particularly in the social sciences which are to be of some political and public use, it is essential to at least try to communicate with ordinary citizens. There is a considerable historical pre­ce­dent for this. After all, even in economics, people like Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Keynes were not trying to write exclusively for professors, and in history the same is true. There are some very good historians who expect to be read by the broad public. To some extent this is a bit of an illusion, because one isn’t really writing for the average reader of the daily paper or the average television viewer. One does write for people who have a certain basic education.

This model of the knowledgeable layperson appeared on the first page of the preface of The Age of Revolution, whose “ideal reader” was supposed to be “the intelligent and educated citizen, who is not merely curious about the past, but wishes to understand how and why the world has come to be what it is today and whither it is going.” 

In a narrow sense, this corresponded to the kind of adult students Hobsbawm taught at Birkbeck College, many of whom were returning to university education after long periods of employment and had gained considerable life experience. In a broader sense, this characterization of the ideal reading public was in line with the sorts of readers who were consumers and targets of the nonfiction paperback revolution. Hobsbawm’s writing was designed not simply to appeal to this public but also to partake in the act of creating it. This had a political dimension: his writing was a form of left-wing pedagogy — or, to put it differently, a form of consciousness-raising mediated through the written word. In this way, writing for the “intelligent and educated citizen” could be framed as a political act.

Pedagogy thus lay at the heart of The Age of Revolution. The book was designed to be a didactic exercise in “haute vulgarisation,” a term Hobsbawm had used as early as the mid-1950s. The contents of the book were organized in such a way as to educate readers about the period in question and to provide analytical structures that could be used to understand it. This set clear parameters for the style and approach. First, it required the elimination of any jargon, Marxist or otherwise. This was straightforward for Hobsbawm, who was not given to jargon, even in his most Marxist writings. He was on rec­ord to say that it was “essential” for academics to write in “normal language.” Second, it demanded absolute clarity of prose. Again, this did not take much effort. Hobsbawm’s prose was dominated by short sentences and a staccato rhythm, which were attributes he refined further in The Age of Revolution. Third, it necessitated the frequent use of lists. These appeared throughout the book. In most cases, they were used to summarize the reasons for a given event or process. The technique of breaking down explanations into a list of factors was a staple of the undergraduate student lecture in history, where the schematic presentation of causes and consequences was a vital pedagogical tool. Fi­nally, and most importantly, Hobsbawm’s pedagogical approach depended on pithy descriptions of highly complex theories. Take, for example, the remarkable passage in which Hobsbawm described the structure of “bourgeois” revolutions:

In brief, the main shape of French and all subsequent bourgeois-revolutionary politics were by now clearly vis­i­ble. This dramatic dialectical dance was to dominate future generations. Time and again we shall see moderate middle-class reformers mobilizing the masses against die-hard resistance or counter-revolution. We shall see the masses pushing beyond the moderates’ aims to their own social revolutions, and the moderates in turn splitting into a conservative group henceforth making common cause with the reactionaries, and a left-wing group determined to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved moderate aims with the help of the masses, even at the risk of losing control over them.

Even to Marxist historians of the French Revolution in the 1960s, this would have seemed a highly simplified version of what took place in France after 1789. But the explanatory power of this passage lay in the clarity with which Hobsbawm captured the dramatic push and pull of the revolutionary moment and the ease with which he then extrapolated from one revolution to all revolutions. His uncharacteristic use of the overtly Marxist word “dialectical,” which might otherwise sound jarring, was softened by the plethora of other terms that surrounded it: “reactionary,” “conservative,” “masses,” “counter-revolution.” The result was a razor-sharp dissection of the dynamics of modern revolutionary processes that still remained faithful to the terminology of the time. Where many con­ temporary social theorists would have taken hundreds of pages to outline their theory of revolution, this same task was dispatched here, without warning, in four sentences.

If Hobsbawm’s commitment to pedagogy depended on concision and clarity, it also required him to maintain the interest of his readers. This sometimes took the form of arresting metaphors and associations: in his review essay, Anderson noted how frequently Hobsbawm drew on the natu­ral world for his descriptions. At other times, it took the form of pointed adjectives to describe historical personalities: the “prim” Robes­pierre, the “huge and whoring” Danton, the “disagreeable, neurotic” Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or the “wooly-minded” Mazzini.

­These descriptions were designed to restore texture to historical events by allowing readers to grasp the emotions that swirled around pro­cesses or people. The same was true of the way Hobsbawm played with differ­ent scales: he wrote from a “bird’s eye view,” but he reveled in intricate details. In his discussion of the arts, for instance, he offered up another remarkably concise summary of his basic analytical framework: “If a single misleading sentence is to sum up the relations of artist and society in [the period 1789–1848], we might say that the French Revolution inspired him by its example, the Industrial Revolution by its horror, and the bourgeois society, which emerged from both, transformed his very existence and modes of creation.”

Yet, rather than follow this up with additional theoretical gloss, Hobsbawm immediately moved on to discuss Mozart’s The Magic Flute, Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, and the novels of Goethe, Dickens, Pushkin, and Balzac. The juxtaposition of very specific examples with a very high degree of conceptual abstraction —in this case, what essentially amounted to a theory of the arts in bourgeois society —­ was characteristic of his ability to move between scales in a way that felt natu­ral. Of course, as some perceptive readers have observed, this ability was a “speech act of mastery, of command —­ certainly not of epistemological humility.” This was the pedagogy of the old-fashioned lecture hall, in which a man stands on a podium and explains what the audience should think. But in spite of — or perhaps because of —­ this claim to omniscience, it was hugely appealing to Hobsbawm’s intended readership. They came searching for explanation but left in awe of his encyclopedic knowledge. His ability to pick out exactly the example or case study that would illuminate his point gave his arguments tremendous power.

At the same time, the liberal deployment of small-scale or individual examples was a methodological statement. Hobsbawm believed firmly in what we might call a grounded pedagogy. He thought that students and readers learned best when they could grasp the human stakes of historical change. This explains why he systematically inserted statistics, examples, dates, or microbiographies whenever he felt that theory might overwhelm his narrative. This also explains the normative character of his writing, which was a partic­u­lar feature of all the books in the Ages series. Hobsbawm had opinions about the periods,­ people, and places he wrote about, and it was part of his grounded pedagogical approach to be completely transparent about what these were. This did not, in his view, affect the quality or accuracy of his historical writing; it was simply a way of recognizing that neutrality was an unhelpful fiction. As he put it in the mid-1950s:

Social scientists are not neutral, but often moved by strong personal passions or practical aims … It is a mistake to believe that the scientist must be unbiased, an impossible demand. He must allow his bias to be controlled by the facts, as investigated by the methods and subject to the criteria of his discipline. Nevertheless, the subject of this book is controversial, and it will certainly be judged by many readers according to their predilections, and their attitude towards the author’s views, which should be apparent. He is on the side of the working-classes.

By the time he was writing The Age of Revolution, he had somewhat tempered such admissions of bias. But he never stopped expressing his opinion. In The Age of Revolution alone, he offered withering judgements on every­ thing from anarchism to the Chartists, and few readers can be impervious to his searing description of romanticism, which seems to reflect his fascination and revulsion for a fundamentally de­cadent art form. 

As time went on and the fear of censorship receded, Hobsbawm became more open about his prejudices and preconceptions. In a now famous passage in the introduction to The Age of Capital he announced that

the historian cannot be objective about the period which is his subject … The author of this book cannot conceal a certain distaste, perhaps a certain contempt, for the age with which it deals … he does not share the nostalgic longing for the certainty, the self-confidence, of the mid-nineteenth-­century bourgeois world … His sympathies lie with those to whom few listened a century ago. In any case, both the certainty and the self-confidence­ were mistaken. 

For Hobsbawm, strongly held opinions were a central part of his pedagogical approach. They were a matter of intellectual honesty and a way of securing the attention of his audience.

Excerpted from The Age of Hobsbawm: The Life of a Revolutionary Historian by Emile Chabal, published by The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Buy This Book

Most treatments of Stoddard, Grant, and the other eugenicists emphasize their role in popularizing “scientific racism” in America. Racist thought — the belief that humanity is not a single species but is separated into genetically distinct races, and that the white race is a superior biological entity — certainly was at the heart of their intellectual project. But to view their philosophical racism as merely a simple, if extreme, form of prejudice or as an expression of fears of cultural change is to misunderstand the nature of their thought and its political implications. What made them exceptional in the American context was not only their racial prejudice, which was widely shared among many white Americans, but the logic of their argument for dispensing with egalitarianism and democracy across the board.

These were not fringe thinkers. For most of the teens and 1920s, they were thoroughly in the mainstream of American political and intellectual life. As a journalist and popular historian, Stoddard had to be acutely sensitive to cultural trends so that he could make his living writing books and articles capable of commanding the interest of editors and the attention of a mass audience. What defined his thinking, and that of the others in his circle, was its rejection of any vision of an underlying, essential equality of human worth as weak, sentimental, and false — ­a danger to civilization. For Stoddard, race was part of a larger system of hierarchical thinking about what kind of people deserved to perform what kind of work and who deserved to benefit from their exertions.

For Stoddard as a young writer, his convictions shaped already by his work on Haiti, the world of scientific racism would have seemed easily accessible and the professional rewards for participating in it considerable. After arriving in New York, he became a member of the Galton Society, an exclusive private club for the promotion of eugenics. It is probably through this connection that he got to know Madison Grant well enough that Grant wrote a foreword to Stoddard’s 1920 book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which called on the white world to embrace a spirit of confrontation and challenge, to maintain its political and economic power.

Stoddard began by framing the historic contest of the moment in terms of World War I. The Great War, he argued, had been an “internecine death-grapple” between rivalrous groups of white Europeans, which had been greeted with astonishment by the colonized peoples of the world. Prior to the war, Asia and Africa had been cowed by “fear of white power” and by the “magnitude of the task involved in overthrowing white supremacy.” But in the war, this “respect for white civilization” had dropped away “like garments outworn,” leaving behind the “mingled exultation, hate, and scorn” of “every portion of the colored world.” Stoddard cited W.E.B. Du Bois and Japanese poet Yone Noguchi (father of sculptor Isamu Noguchi) as examples of thinkers who were no longer simply willing to accept the tutelage of Europeans. He called for “white solidarity” to meet the “crisis of the age.” “Decisions — firm decisions — must be made. Constructive measures — drastic measures — must be taken … Else — ­Swift oblivion in the dark ocean.” Grant echoed these warnings in his introduction to Stoddard’s book, opining that democracy was “suicide pure and simple” in an interracial society.

The Rising Tide of Color was the smash hit of which Stoddard had dreamed, winning accolades from academics and the general public alike. It was a bestseller and went through multiple printings. Scholars praised the book, including the acting president of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, who solicited a piece on immigration by Stoddard for the annals of the academy. The Saturday Evening Post lauded the book and recommended it to “readers who can face without wincing the impact of new and disturbing ideas.” Political figures commented prominently, endorsements that its publisher (Scribner) then used for promotion. Senator James Vardaman of Mississippi, a leading white supremacist Southern Democrat, recommended it to President Warren G. Harding and suggested the formation of a committee to study the problem of race in the South that would include Stoddard and Madison Grant (Vardaman struck up a correspondence with Stoddard as well). Unlikely intellectuals expressed their appreciation of Rising Tide, including the Harlem socialist and radical Hubert Harrison, who reviewed the book for Negro World and corresponded with Stoddard following its publication, describing it as “unrivalled” as a work of international journalism, even though, he wrote, “Naturally, since I am a Negro, my sympathies are not at all with you: that which you fear, I naturally hope for.”

In Stoddard’s greatest coup, President Harding referred to his book in a speech in Birmingham, Alabama, celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the city’s founding: “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on ‘The Rising Tide of Color’ … must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue that the whole world confronts.”

The Rising Tide of Color was published shortly after a wave of extreme violence against African Americans in East St. Louis (1917) and Chicago (1919). It helped both to justify and to inspire the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which was gaining momentum and members in the North and Midwest. The book, part of a larger intellectual subculture of “scientific” racism, crystallized the reaction against racial equality in the aftermath of World War I. 

Many other writers at the time (most of whom have since been forgotten) echoed Stoddard’s themes, warning that a racially mixed society had to limit democratic politics. Any other possibility exalted a sentimental ideal of natural rights over the brute reality of inequality. For example, the author Alleyne Ireland warned in a 1918 essay in the Journal of Heredity that “the accepted facts of heredity” explained the inefficiency and limits of democratic government. Only “our blind acceptance of a religious doctrine — the natural rights of man — as a religious principle” led people to insist on the merits of democracy, when a realistic appraisal showed that those societies were the best in which the fewest people had a say in their affairs and operations. William McDougall wrote in his 1921 book Is America Safe for Democracy? that some people were more “valuable” than others, a cold fact that had to call the principle of democracy into question: “If Nature has made men of unequal value, the cruelty is hers, not ours . . . we do no wrong in ascertaining and recording the facts.”

Stoddard wrote two books in rapid succession in the years that followed the success of Rising Tide. The first, The New World of Islam (1921), identified politically charged Islam as a radicalizing force in the Muslim world, which was inculcating a “reactionary hatred” of Western civilization, and predicted that a clash between Islamic nationalism and Bolshevism would dominate the politics of the Middle East for some time to come. But it was Stoddard’s next popular book — ­The Revolt Against Civilization, published again by Scribner in 1922 — ­that made the fullest case that the future of civilization required the preservation of social hierarchy. Hierarchy was the ideal condition of humankind, Stoddard argued, and it had to be accepted and embraced for civilization to cohere at all. The core reason race mattered was that it assigned to people their place in the economic hierarchy — ­and preserving racial divisions was necessary to guarantee that people kept doing the work they were supposed to do.

In The Revolt Against Civilization, Stoddard was responding to the world developments that accompanied the end of World War I — ­most notably the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia; the formation of the Third International, or the Comintern, which sought to unify communist parties around the world under the direction of the Soviet Union; and the strikes and social unrest that swept through the United States at the end of the 1910s. His earlier work had presented an image of the rest of the world rising against America and Europe — the white West. But in The Revolt Against Civilization, he imagined that the greater danger came from within. Borrowing heavily from Nietzsche, he presented humanity as divided between the Under-Man, driven by his resentment and hatred predicated on his awareness of his own inferiority, and the Over-Man, whose nobility and capacity to act set him apart. In ordinary times, the Under-Man could be controlled by the prison and the scaffold, as Stoddard put it. But in moments of social breakdown — as in the First World War — he would burst to the surface in a spirit of “atavistic revolt.”

The Revolt Against Civilization opened with a stark depiction of human civilization as “fundamentally conditioned by race.” The “backward peoples of the earth,” as Stoddard called them, would always seek out the centers of civilization, drawn to their ease, material wealth, luxury, and comfort. But these lower races remained “uncivilizable,” and what was more, they hated and resented the very civilized society that nurtured them. “Every society engenders within itself hordes of savages and barbarians, ripe for revolt and ever ready to pour forth and destroy.”

The great danger for Stoddard was the philosophy of “levelling equality,” which he believed was the rallying cry of the Under-Man. “Natural equality,” he wrote, “is one of the most pernicious delusions that has ever afflicted mankind,” a “figment of the human imagination.” There was a natural “Law of Inequality as universal and inflexible as the Law of Gravitation.” Science, biology, and eugenics all showed that this was the case, that heredity and not environment shaped human character. From Stoddard’s point of view, the Bolshevik Revolution challenged this incontrovertible truth. Modern society had bred a class of people who resented and feared the inequality that modern science showed was the undeniable reality of life. In the past, pleasant dreams of universal human equality might have pacified the Under-Man, but the present was different: “Now that Nature herself proclaims him irremediably inferior, his hatred of superiority knows no bounds.”

The result was an inherently unstable social order, for the Under-Man was perpetually dissatisfied, constantly ready to tear down his superiors. For Stoddard, the most serious threat posed by the Under-Man was not biological (that he would reproduce and in time outnumber his superiors) but political: “Let us, then, understand once and for all that we have among us a rebel army — the vast host of the unadaptable, the incapable, the envious, the discontented, filled with instinctive hatred of civilization and progress, and ready on the instant to rise in revolt.” Understanding heredity and biology, for Stoddard, meant acknowledging that democratic government was an impossibility: “Democracy was never intended for degenerates, and a nation breeding freely of the sort that must continually be repressed is not headed toward an extension of democratic liberties.” Tracing out the logical consequences of the rejection of human equality as an ideal, Stoddard suggested that democracy should be replaced by “neo-aristocracy” as the standard for humankind. Preaching about equality and democracy would only inspire social turmoil, for it would “[stir] the little-brained to hope for an impossible leveling of human beings.”

Despite the enthusiastic reception for The Revolt Against Civilization, the book was not the runaway hit that Rising Tide of Color had been. Nothing Stoddard did afterward garnered the same attention. His reception had depended entirely on the presence of a movement eager for what he had to say; once that waned, few were interested. 

Stoddard kept trying to recapture the spotlight he had had for Rising Tide of Color. In 1927, he published Re-Forging America, a popular retelling of American history in which he presented the American Revolution as hopelessly influenced by the French, who were to blame for the bold statements about equality. Absent these, he asserted, separation from Britain would have happened with far less bloodshed and would not have alienated many of those who would otherwise have been the leading citizens of the country. Looking at the contemporary United States, Stoddard suggested that Jim Crow (then formally restricted to the South) should become a national system of segregation. He termed this “bi-racialism,” calling it “the key to social peace” and envisioning the adoption of apartheid laws on the national level under which black and white Americans would be separated politically, socially, and culturally. Black people under this system might be given limited political rights, but only over their own separate institutions. The idea met with enthusiasm from people like Alabama Senator Hugo Black (who would later become a Supreme Court Justice), who wrote in a letter to Stoddard, “As a son of the South, it is a pleasure to tell a son of New England, that I believe your national doctrine to be worthy of the admiration of every loyal American.”

In a series of appearances that seemed simultaneously a measure of his declining confidence and his eagerness to hold the public eye in whatever way he could, Stoddard participated in debates in the late 1920s with Harlem Renaissance leader Alain LeRoy Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois had long been coolly dismissive of Stoddard, writing (accurately) in 1923 that “Lothrop Stoddard has no standing as a sociologist … He is simply a popular writer who has some vogue now.” In 1929, Stoddard challenged Du Bois in Chicago on the topic of “Shall the Negro Be Encouraged to Seek Cultural Equality?” Du Bois would take the affirmative, Stoddard, not surprisingly, the negative. 

Du Bois, who was at that time sixty-one, calmly demolished the argument that black people should be excluded from cultural equality, which he interpreted to mean their full, active engagement with cultural and intellectual life.

“What could you conceive as better than a world in which all the citizens of that world were not only encouraged to seek cultural equality, but accomplished it?” Du Bois asked. At an earlier point in time, Du Bois argued, the white position had been that black people were simply incapable of participating in a shared cultural or intellectual life: “In the early days, they said, and said frankly, ‘No, you shouldn’t encourage the Negro to cultural equality, because he cannot reach it: he is not really human in the sense that other people are human.’ ” Emancipation and the strides toward black equality in the North had made this frank position harder for whites to take. Instead, people like Stoddard continued to resist equality, but with a twist: “They would say that the coming forth of these people does not mean they can make as great a gift to culture as the white people have made, but, whether they can or not, they must not be allowed to come forward, because it threatens civilization” — as though civilization was a zero-sum game, in which there was never enough to go round. The real issue, Du Bois argued, had nothing to do with protecting high ideals; at stake was simply ensuring the brutal ability of white people to dominate and exploit black Americans.

The Chicago Daily Tribune did not cover the event, but the headline in The Chicago Defender, a black newspaper, left no doubts about who had won the day: “Du Bois Shatters Stoddard’s Cultural Theories in Debate.” The Baltimore Afro-American was even more direct: “5,000 Cheer W.E.B. Du Bois, Laugh at Lothrop Stoddard.”

Though his cachet was dwindling rapidly, Stoddard continued writing, trying to make his reactionary faith relevant again to a broad audience. With the rise of fascism, he thought he might have found a new way to provoke attention and win readers — recognizing in it something akin to the belief in fundamental inequality he had long promoted. In 1927, five years after the March on Rome that brought about the resignation of Italy’s sitting prime minister and the ascension of Benito Mussolini, he wrote a short piece on fascism in Harper’s arguing that it was time to take a fresh look at fascist thought as a bracing corrective to America’s sentimental illusions. What appealed to Stoddard about fascism was that it “assailed the idol” that “all men are created equal.” 

Not all of Stoddard’s later writings were as politically pointed as his appreciation of fascism, but they were about as poorly timed. He published a book about luck on Friday, September 13, 1929 — shortly before the collapse of the stock market. He brought out a follow-up to Rising Tide called Clashing Tides of Color, which revisited many of his old racial concerns. By this time, the tone of American opinion had shifted so considerably that the book — while still well received in England — was roundly condemned in the American press. Nonetheless, Stoddard was still within the bounds of the respectable. He was occasionally invited to give commencement addresses and the like at conservative institutions — for example, he spoke to the graduating seniors at Virginia’s Staunton Military Academy in 1938.

This changed with the rise of Nazism. In 1939, Stoddard traveled to Europe to report on Germany at the start of the Second World War. He imagined that he might be able to write a bestselling account of Nazi rule, boasting that he would approach the subject with an “open mind” and an “objective attitude.” He interviewed Goebbels, Göring, Himmler, and Hitler. When he met Hitler, he described his “firm handshake and pleasant smile,” writing that the “Master of Greater Germany” was in good health, calm, fit, and poised, although less charming than Mussolini, whom Stoddard had also personally met. Publishing apologetic newspaper pieces as he prepared his longer book of reportage on the Nazi regime, he reprinted Goebbels’ claims that England made a grave mistake when it presented the conflict with Germany as one between democracy and dictatorship. “Isn’t the National Socialist Party essentially the German people? Are not its leaders men of the people?”

His final book — a travel guide to Nazi Germany in the year after Kristallnacht — had a disconcertingly jaunty tone. “My first meal in the Third Reich was a distinct success,” Stoddard reported. “As might have been expected in this pre-eminent Nazi hostelry, the food was good and the service quick.” He described Himmler as “the redoubtable head of the Gestapo,” and interviewed him about the “resettlement policy” of the Jews, noting that Himmler carefully avoided talking about “the tragic aspects” of dislocation, expropriation, and concentration camps this policy involved. Berlin, Stoddard wrote, was “one of the safest cities in the world for even the most prosperous-appearing person” — thanks to the Nazis’ tough­-on-crime policies.

Writing as a detached observer of Nazi social policy, Stoddard chronicled with approval his visit to a eugenics court, where he could see his ideas about “the modern science of eugenics, or race betterment” put into practice. “The Jewish problem is regarded as a passing phenomenon,” he wrote, “already settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves from the Third Reich.” (What that elimination meant Stoddard did not specify — nor, of course, did he offer any objection to the deportation of Jews to camps or to the widespread racist laws that were already firmly in place by the time of his visit to Germany.) Nazi eugenics — which Stoddard breezily described as “the most ambitious and far­reaching experiment in eugenics ever attempted by any nation” — was in his view primarily concerned with replenishing the racial stock of the nation, “in a bad way” at the start of the Nazi years. Stoddard came away with a positive impression of the eugenics court, writing that the “painstaking, methodical” approach of the proceedings left him convinced that “the law was being administered with strict regard … if anything, judgments were almost too conservative” — but that it was “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock in a scientific and truly humanitarian way.”

Stoddard immediately recognized that the eugenics court was akin to his own political project. That he could extol it shows how shallow his moral understanding was — but it also points to his complete misreading of the political dynamics of 1940, his misplaced confidence that scientific racism would still command the support of a large part of the American public. At the same time, he did recognize that by 1940 popular opinion in the United States would no longer embrace open declarations of sympathy with Hitler, and he permitted himself a few snipes at the Nazi leader. Hitler, he complained, refused to let him quote their interview directly. The Nazis were “fanatical zealots,” quite “unscrupulous in their methods.” He wrote of returning to the United States and feeling a sense of relief to be once more among people who were not “worried and harassed and ulcerated by nationalistic hatreds.” Not that it mattered: Into the Darkness quickly disappeared into darkness and obscurity itself. Stoddard’s last bid for popularity was a pathetic failure.

Adapted from Country of Lords: Neo-Aristocrats, Social Darwinists, Tech Utopians, and the Long Fight Against Equality in America. Copyright © 2026 by Kim Phillips-Fein. Reprinted with permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Buy This Book

Shouldering sole responsibility for childcare, subsistence, and the welfare of their households and family businesses amid the chaos and uncertainty of war — at times with British officers quartered in their residences — many white women also experienced the Revolution as a prolonged period of anxiety and emotional distress. “Tedious days Melancholly nights,” Mary Gould Almy lamented from Newport in 1778; “I wonder what keeps me alive.” By lonely firesides, women gathered their children in their laps as cannons echoed overhead and windowpanes rattled around them. Burying their own apprehensions, they reassured anxious daughters and sons that their fathers would be home soon — even as they increasingly referred to themselves as widows in their own minds. Separation, Sarah Redwood Fisher admitted, was “very hard to bare.” Crying into their pillows, women dreamed of embracing their husbands and fervently wished for the safe return of their partners. Letters offered momentary consolation, but they were “a cold comfort in a winters Night,” especially as letters were often guarded, constrained by the knowledge that correspondence was carried unsealed across military lines and open to prying eyes. “The open manner in which our letters are sent, prevents the feelings of the Heart being properly express’d,” Elizabeth Drinker regretted during her husband Henry’s exile. Still, the couple’s children treasured these stilted communications. Seven-year-old Henry memorized the letter his father wrote to him. And three-year-old Molly, after listening attentively to the parts of her father’s missive addressed to her, went up to her mother “without speaking, with her mouth held up by way of demanding the Kiss [her father] sent her.”

The end of the war meant that, at long last, these desires for reunification could be made real. Peace promised an end to uncertainty and separation, to loneliness and fear — for white families, at least. It meant that they no longer worried about soldiers knocking at their door to request quarters or being awakened in the middle of the night by armed men ransacking their homes. It meant an easing of the daily hardship of subsistence and survival, a return to bustling markets and abundant crops. For women of all races, peace lessened — though certainly did not alleviate — the threat of rape and violence that shaped the way they moved through their neighborhoods as they navigated life under military occupation. Nearly six months to the day after the British evacuated Philadelphia — having spent much of the previous year pregnant, caring for an infant and a toddler while separated from her husband —Sarah Logan Fisher enjoyed a contented evening at home with her “beloved” husband and “our sweet Children.” “May we be sensible of the Blessing and favour of being united together and having two such sweet pledges of our mutual Love,” she reflected in her diary; “it seems a Happiness almost too exquisite to last.”

For white men and women alike, peace promised the one thing that many families had longed for during the war: “domestic Happiness.” In the postwar years, Americans embraced their families with vigor. Some elite white women, especially those of the younger generation, like Lucy Knox, wife of Continental major general Henry Knox, were nevertheless reluctant to relinquish the domestic power they had wielded during the war. “I hope you will not consider yourself as commander in chief of our own house,” Lucy insisted, declaring, “There is such a thing as equal command.” But such women were, in many ways, outliers. War had exposed the fault lines in traditional household arrangements and left many women vulnerable. Eager for a return to normalcy, many white women were happy to retreat from the position of household head on their husbands’ return. After all, they realized, there was protection in dependence. “All my desires and all my ambition is to be Esteemed and Loved by my Partner, to join with him in the Education and instruction of our Little ones, to set under our own vines in Peace, Liberty and Safety,” Abigail Adams avowed. Family life, free from the burdens and fears of war, was an alluring prospect after years of separation, hardship, and anxiety. Writing to his wife, Mary, from whom he was separated for nearly a decade, Benjamin Pickman expressed his desire to “pass my Days in Tranquility at Home” with his family. “For the remaining Part of my Life I shall be only a Spectator,” he promised; “I am determined to preserve my Mind unruffled should I see the Whole Fabrick of Nations crumbling to Pieces.” The fruits of liberty were to be found in domestic tranquility.

Indeed, in the introductory preface to her 1805 History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, historian Mercy Otis Warren invoked these shared remembrances of domestic warfare to soften readers’ prejudices toward a history of war authored by a woman. “Doubtless it is the more peculiar province … of manly eloquence, to describe the blood-stained field, and relate the story of slaughtered armies,” she acknowledged. Yet, she argued, the warfare of the American Revolution had not been limited to “the blood-stained field.” It had been a war waged on city streets, among civilian communities, and within American households. “The horrors of civil war rushing to habitations not inured to scenes of rapine and misery; even to the quiet cottage, where only concord and affection had reigned; stimulated to observation a mind that had not yielded to the assertion, that all political attentions lay out of the road of female life,” she explained. The war’s intrusion into the most intimate domains of American households affected men and women alike. Foregrounding this perspective, she hoped, would resonate among readers. For as Mercy Otis Warren acutely understood, for many citizens of the new United States, the trauma of the American Revolution was fundamentally entwined with domestic life.

Both during and after the Revolution, white Americans invoked the biblical image of the vine and fig tree to express their hopes for peace, domestic bliss, and freedom from fear in the new nation. Derived from Micah 4:4 — “Every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid” — the metaphor was not new in revolutionary circles. As early as 1769, colonists adopted the phrase to draw explicit connections between revolutionaries’ efforts to secure political liberty and the sanctity of their domestic lives. During the early years of the imperial crisis, the metaphor conveyed the invasive nature of taxes and fears of search and seizure, but the experience of war and British occupation gave new awareness to the meaning and consequences of domestic invasion. After the outbreak of war, the notion of a secure domestic refuge became both a distant memory and a hope for the future that conveyed both long-awaited familial reunions and the promised blessings of liberty. As Virginia delegate to the Continental Congress George Mason fervently wished in 1776 amid the throes of war, “May God grant us a Return of those halcyon Days; when every Man may sit down at his Ease under the Shade of his own Vine, and his own fig-tree, and enjoy the Sweets of domestic Life!”

Perhaps no American revolutionary invoked the imagery of the vine and fig tree more frequently than George Washington. The metaphor is pervasive throughout the general’s personal correspondence, especially as the war drew to a close. Awaiting word of the final peace treaty in October 1783, he expressed his “a[n]xious desire to quit the walks of public life, and under the shadow of my own vine, and my own Fig-tree, to seek those enjoyments, and that relaxation, which a mind that has been constantly upon the stretch for more than eight years, stands so much in need of.”

Aligning with many peoples’ own desires for domestic tranquility, Washington’s well-known love of private life and his long-desired homecoming endowed his beloved Mount Vernon with outsized significance in the young Republic. Throughout the country, Americans celebrated General Washington’s triumphant return to his plantation, heralding him as the American Cincinnatus, an allusion to the Roman general who relinquished power and retired to his farm after defeating a tyrant. “Without Mount Vernon, the comparison to Cincinnatus would not work,” one Washington scholar has argued; “the public had to understand the private world Washington left and returned to in order to appreciate his sacrifice.” Symbolizing George Washington’s long-awaited retirement, Mount Vernon loomed large in the popular imagination as a peaceful retreat where the conquering hero returned home to reap the fruits of his sacrifices to the nation. The plantation, scholars have argued, was “the tangible embodiment of his independence,” both as an autonomous landholder and a citizen of the new United States; the hero’s return to his safe, protected household symbolized both the sacrifices of war and the hopes of the nation. War and British occupation had demolished colonists’ conception of houses as castles; but, in the aftermath of the Revolution, Mount Vernon provided a new symbol for the nation to rally around: the tranquil, independent household as the reward for white Americans’ wartime sacrifices and patriotism — without the troublesome monarchical metaphor.

Enshrining domestic life as a critical pillar of American independence, the public veneration of Mount Vernon signified the emergence of an incipient “secular American culture and identity” centered around the private home. Reflecting many Americans’ own desires for domestic tranquility in the aftermath of civil war, the Washingtons’ private retreat became a public spectacle in the early years of the Republic. Visitors made pilgrimages to Mount Vernon to observe the victorious general and partake in the fruits of his victory.

As the Washingtons and their numerous enslaved laborers entertained these visitors, they performed republican independence and American domesticity for an eager public. These enactments, which were also circulated in print form, notably Edward Savage’s depictions of George Washington — clad in his military uniform, strolling on the west lawn of Mount Vernon, and gathered around the table with his family (with enslaved laborers in both images hovering near the edges of the frame) — lauded both the general’s domestic retirement and the idealized postwar household.

This public obsession with Mount Vernon helped cement the relationship between private domesticity and American independence in the ­national consciousness. Mount Vernon, with its classically inspired, republican simplicity — that maintained the racial and gender hierarchies of the plantation household — offered a model of American architecture and American households at a time when most other publicly identifiable buildings were vestiges of British rule. George Washington’s unique position as the general who won American independence, as the nation’s first president — as the father of the country — meant that Mount Vernon also came to be the nation’s home, a widely recognizable, uniquely American symbol that united the nascent Republic. Printmakers and engravers throughout the nation reproduced Savage’s images of Mount Vernon, circulating them for popular consumption. By the end of the 18th century, these images of Mount Vernon proliferated to an unprecedented degree, appearing on mass-­produced clocks and ceramics.

In purchasing these items, American citizens could bring Mount Vernon into their own households, emulating the general’s domestic felicity beneath their own vines and fig trees. Within the popular imagination, Mount Vernon not only came to symbolize the fruits of victory, it actively modeled the practice of independence in the new Republic.

And so, perhaps it is unsurprising that, in the years after the war, white American men reclaimed their households, where they, like Washington, planned to enjoy the fruits of independence under their own vines and fig trees, surrounded by their families and “enjoy[ing], without molestation, the sweets of Peace and domestic happiness.” The resumption of domestic life, free from fear, was integral to how many white Americans envisioned their newfound independence. After eight long years of war, familial separation, and hardship, revolutionaries reveled in their hard-won domestic tranquility, secure in the belief that their residences were safe from the invasions and violations of the war years. As officials in Schenectady, New York, proclaimed in June 1782, “We anticipate the glorious period when the Voice of War shall be at an end, when the Inhabitants of our Bleeding Country, shall be enabled to sit under their Vines and Fig-Trees, and no savage foe to disturb their Rest.”

During the 1780s and 1790s, domestic life found its way into national politics as a symbol for American independence precisely because it resonated among a war-weary populace — many of whom had already embraced domestic tranquility as their reward for wartime hardship. “There is no part of the earth where so much” domestic happiness “is enjoyed as in America,” Thomas Jefferson enthused in 1788. Domestic felicity, Americans agreed, was uniquely entwined with the character of the new nation. No other country, Abigail Adams proudly proclaimed, “Boast[ed] that first of Blessings, the Glory of Humane Nature; the inestimable privelege of setting down under their vines; and fig trees, enjoying in peace and security what ever Heaven has lent them; having none to make them affraid.”

So pervasive was this association of domestic tranquility with the American nation and the American character that, by 1797, as American officials drew up plans for new peace medals to be distributed in diplomatic exchanges with Indigenous nations, they chose scenes representing domestic life. Designed by Continental veteran John Trumbull, the three medals, collectively known as the “Season Medals,” were struck in 1798 to commemorate Washington’s second presidential term. Trumbull’s motifs depict idealized domestic scenes: a farmer sowing his fields with a rustic cabin in the background; a shepherd overseeing his herds; a woman spinning by the hearth with her children — one in a cradle, one playing at her feet — and another woman, weaving in the background, while a teakettle boils. Intended to both encourage assimilation and to convey the authority and power of the new nation, the peace medals were proclamations of identity.

Domestic life, they made clear, was vital to the practice of independence, to American nationalism, and to projections of state power.

From The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Making of American Independence by Lauren Duval. Copyright © 2025 by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Used by permission of the University of North Carolina Press.

Buy This Book

Want to keep reading about the 250th? Here is Bruce W. Dearstyne on how Calvin Coolidge celebrated the United States’ 150th anniversary, Marc Egnal on the historiography of the causes of the American Revolution, Robert A. Gross on why we call it the “American Revolution,” and Marc Stein on 1976. Find even more to explore on Bunk.

The robber barons speculated on new lines, bet against others, and otherwise treated the economic livelihood of millions like a casino game. They were allowed to do so through a system of political power based on a regional hierarchy. New England, New York, and Washington held the nexus of industrial might, with every industrialized city serving as a franchise opportunity for the ultra-wealthy.

At the time, St. Louis was a city to bet on. As the historian James Neal Primm notes in The Lion of the Valley, while the boardrooms were in New York, the “general offices of this railroad empire were in St. Louis.” Jay Gould, one of the most notoriously ruthless robber barons, was interested in St. Louis as the gateway to the undeveloped West. St. Louis, the doorman to the extensive cache offered by the American West, thus became geopolitically important. For Gould, the city was a means to control two of his major Western railroads — the Missouri Pacific and the Denver & Rio Grande. “There was not an ounce of civic virtue in him,” Primm writes. “He cared as little for St. Louis as he did for New York. His goals were money and power, but in their pursuit he filled the warehouses and made the rails hum.”

But money is not value. What made the railways hum, said Marx, were the workers who hammered stakes into the tracks, and shoveled coal into the engines, and greased the machinations of iron and fire that circulated capital. Without labor, everything came screeching to a halt. 

Rail yard strikes had broken out across the U.S. during the summer of 1877, as if lightning had struck the tracks, shooting westward current through the Baltimore rail yards, to the fields of iron tracks in Philadelphia, to the hub of Chicago, and now to the last outpost of civilization before California: St. Louis, a city choked with railways spanning the Mississippi. Bridges made St. Louis an artery particularly vulnerable to interruptions in American capital flows.

St. Louis railway workers demanded the restoration of a wage scale that had been ripped away from them in the recent boom-and-bust cycle of bankruptcies. A vote was taken, and the workers said yes — strike. 

The iron heart of St. Louis stopped during the Great Strike in 1877. Capital was paralyzed, and panic began to set in. “The railroad employees met at East St. Louis tonight and have resolved to stop all freight trains and switching engines after midnight,” wrote J. H. Wilson, a railroad manager, to the secretary of the interior in Washington, DC. “No violence yet. Are there any troops at arsenal here [?] the situation is alarming.” 

From interviews that appeared in newspapers of the time, it’s clear that local opinion backed the strike. It had been provoked by corporate greed. Wages were too low for survival. Everyone in St. Louis lived among the crowds of unemployed, and local leadership knew the crisis could boil over — Henry Overstolz, mayor of St. Louis City, requested that the rail companies meet with the strikers as soon as possible. Mayor Bowman of East St. Louis volunteered to act as a liaison with railroad owners for negotiations. The companies refused. 

The strike leaders of 1877 warned that corporations had taken control of the government and were using money and power to legally enslave everyone. “Why should we allow ourselves to be trodden upon by a few monopolists,” Peter Lofgreen asked the crowd, “who have the reins of government in their hands, are using the organized assassins to crush us?”

Others argued that the military, which had been built to repel invasions of foreign powers, was now being used to oppress and slaughter innocent men, women, and children. Another speaker pointed to the grand buildings of St. Louis, which were owned by the rich, built by the poor. “Why this state of things?” a speaker asked. “Because it’s so, according to the law. Well, if that’s law, then d—n the law. [Prolonged cheers.] If that is the rule that governs society, then the sooner it is broken the better.”

As The New York Sun noted, Black participation in the St. Louis strike served as “a novel feature of the times.” Roustabout labor was backbreaking — it involved long hours hauling cargo on and off the steamships, and was largely performed by African-Americans, many of whom where formerly enslaved. A Black worker took the stage at the rally asked the St. Louis crowd, “Will you stand with us regardless of color?”

“We will!” the crowd shouted back.

Meanwhile, the rich, along with the city’s politicians, got organized around Mayor Overstolz. They met to worry in the Four Courts Building — a police headquarters that resembled a castle of stone, outfitted with prisons in the basement. More arms were transferred to the stronghold to expand its existing storehouse. Mayor Overstolz told his frightened confidants that thirty thousand socialists were fully armed and equipped in the city streets. Since they didn’t have enough troops to arrest everyone and guard them as prisoners, the business elites called for a thousand volunteers to crush the strike. 

When it appeared that Overstolz was wavering, the rich made their own plans. In the imaginations of the elite, the strike had expanded from a set of railroad wage disputes to a greater indictment of corporate capitalism overall. Only six years earlier, the First International had captured Paris and began the Commune, a revolutionary government that controlled Paris for months. Fears of the guillotine were real: The St. Louis rich began sleeping in their clothes, ready to flee or fight, and ordered their servants to do the same. They sent family to the countryside, and became paranoid that the workers would cut off the flow of water to their mansions. They filled the bathtubs, sinks, and every spare bottle in their Lucas and Vandeventer Place estates. 

The violent red fever dream that was cooking up the Four Courts Building did not reflect reality. “Here in St. Louis the most violent doctrines of Communism are proclaimed, but no harm seems to be done by them,” the Globe-Democrat reported. The strike had not caused any destruction of property, and street cops refused to interfere with strikers as the action spread farther west across Missouri to Kansas City, Sedalia, and St. Joseph. As the Globe-Democrat reported, some law enforcement even sided with the strike: “A policeman was asked if he could not make any arrests. He laughed, and said as long as the railroad companies did not interfere with the men running the trains for them, it was none of their business.”

On Tuesday, six companies of federal troops arrived at the Union Depot. Three hundred marched with three Gatling guns. Many of them were African American soldiers, having won access to military service in Lincoln’s service. Now they were being deployed to crush a strike, which included Black roustabouts who’d won their right to a wage (for backbreaking dock labor) in the same struggle. “The same thing had occurred in other cities,” Mark Kruger writes, “where the government attempted to divide the poor according to race by using Black troops to break up strikes.”

Circumventing the mayor, the St. Louis businessmen who would later compose the Veiled Prophet Society formed the “Committee for Public Safety,” which had no legal status. The group was made up of financiers, manufacturers, railroad managers, and other white-collar elites who feared that the workers would soon abolish private property, and that the mayor wasn’t willing to kill enough of them to stop it. Without legal right, the committee took over the Four Courts Building and appointed two ex-generals — one Union and one Confederate — to raise a citizens’ militia. The St. Louis sheriff was directed to raise a posse comitatus.

Wednesday July 25, 1877, represented the apex of the national strike, which was broken by police violence: In Chicago and New York, police fired into crowds of workers, resulting in many dead and many more injured, weakening the national strike. Reports of gunfire in other cities did not deter St. Louis—on Thursday, the following day, sixty factories were shut down, and the crowd remained in firm control of the city. A flour mill was opened in order to provide bread for both the strikers and the general population of St. Louisans huddled into their homes, unsure about the strike, waiting to see what happens. The workers were starting to behave like a government, and offered the people of St. Louis an alternative with plenty of bread, and the trains up and running.

With the approval of the executive committee — including Peter Lofgreen, Albert Currlin, and Henry Allen of the Workingman’s Party — businesses began to reopen under the control of armed strikers so long as they complied with the demand for an eight-hour day. On Thursday, the owner of the Belcher Sugar Refinery came hat in hand to the executive committee asking permission to resume operating the plant — otherwise, a large quantity of sugar would spoil. The strike committee persuaded the refinery workers to go back to work alongside a guard of two hundred men to protect the operation. This was the people’s sugar, and the fulfillment of the ideological underpinning that guided the strike.

Each business that complied was noted, and after the strike was put down, “collaborators” were listed for public shaming in the Missouri Republican. The historian David T. Burbank writes that the Belcher episode represented “the spectacle of the owner of one of the city’s largest industrial enterprises recognizing the de facto authority of the executive committee.”

Historians refer to this as the “St. Louis Soviet,” a short-lived government in its own right. “The St. Louis papers used that term in horror,” Foner points out, but “they still took a certain pride in the claim that it was the ‘only genuine Commune’ established during the Great Strikes of 1877.”

The worst part of every strike story is the moment when the momentum shifts from David back to Goliath. “Having shattered the authority of the city and temporarily paralyzed the wealthy classes,” Foner writes, “the executive committee vacillated, hesitated, and fell back, unsure of what to do next. At the same time, it revealed that it feared the very mass movement it had helped to create.” 

On Thursday, at the height of its power, the executive committee issued a statement urging its twenty-two thousand workers to go home. The railroad companies were refusing to negotiate, and elite calls for military intervention grew more panicked and paranoid. Skilled workers like the rail engineers didn’t want to lose their positions, and the strike leaders declared no more parades, no more speeches. They feared a riot, widespread looting, and arson. Meanwhile, thousands of militia were arriving at the Four Courts, and St. Louis gun stores turned their inventory over to the city fathers and the mayor. 

As Kruger notes, in its war against the Commune, the Committee of Public Safety ransacked the city for weapons and supplies, illegally requisitioned property from citizens, and handed out vouchers to merchants, promising later reimbursement. As Black workers participated in more processions and mass meetings sponsored by the Workingmen’s Party, the Missouri Republican suggested that the movement was begin taken over by “notorious Negroes” who were acting under the “insidious influence of the International” to desecrate social values.

Much blame for the fracturing of the strike lies at the feet of Albert Currlin, who turned Black workers away, believing he could stoke the fires of the strike with white workers alone. Currlin called for arms and for people to enlist their neighbors in the fight, but as Foner writes, “one sure way of keeping Blacks out of mass meetings, and white workers from joining the Black workers, was not to hold any mass meetings at all!”

On Friday, having largely abdicated, the executive committee was reduced to pleading with authorities. They issued a public report that said there were no plans to arm the workers, and that rumors of that nature were “villainous falsehoods.” Those in the streets grew nervous and wanted arms to defend themselves against the militarized blend of militia, National Guard, and posse comitatus. 

The St. Louis businessmen of the Committee for Public Safety operated under no delusion that violent conflict could ever be avoided. They raised $20,000 to arm the militia, and the St. Louis Gun Club contributed shotguns. A sheriff’s order in Friday’s Post-Dispatch threatened regular citizens of St. Louis with arrest and jail time unless they joined the sheriff’s posse and took up arms against the strike. 

On the strength of 1,500 rifles that came from the state arsenal, the militia ousted the strike’s leadership from their headquarters in the Hyde Park Turner Hall. Mayor Overstolz warned the strikers against closing any more factories, and the railroad manager, Wilson, wired Washington, DC, “Time has come when the President should stamp out mob now rampant … The law can be found for it after order is restored.”

Two thousand strikers congregated at the secondary headquarters, Schuler’s Hall, to demand rifles from the executive committee. The Missouri Republican quoted a Black striker who wanted arms turned over to “a company of colored men” who would guarantee that the strike would end quickly and victoriously. The crowd agreed and cried out that the issue was “whether the poor man was going to get any show at all of his rights.” The executive committee refused the call for arms. 

At three o’clock in the afternoon, a police cavalry led by Captain Fox marched on Schuler’s Hall. Behind the cavalry were two files of foot police with bayoneted muskets and a cannon that “showed grimly near the middle of the force,” a Missouri Republican reporter wrote. At the rear of the company was Mayor Overstolz and members of the Committee for Public Safety — this was the first iteration of the Veiled Prophet Society.

Mounted police charged into the crowds at Schuler’s Hall. Thousands of innocent spectators were attacked by swinging clubs, with police aiming for any skull within reach. Three thousand federal soldiers plus five thousand deputized “special police” were deployed.

Police horsewhipped the crowd, and one man was trampled by a horse. Orders were to shoot anyone who resisted, and while many were arrested, only forty-nine stayed in custody.

Hundreds were dead nationwide. In St. Louis, authorities bloodied many workers — and some sources list casualties from skirmishes around the city—but for the most part, the Great Strike in St. Louis occurred without loss of life. As Burbank notes, “The only bloodshed occurred when one of the militiamen slipped off a windowsill of the Four Courts, where he had been sunning himself, and scratched himself on his own bayonet.”

Forty-nine leaders of the Workingmen’s Party were arrested at their headquarters and marched to the Four Courts to be locked up in the jails. Others escaped and fled the city. On Saturday, the East St. Louis Relay Depot was retaken, and the local press wrote the final words: They accused the strike leadership of incompetence and declared that the week had been a failed revolution. The workers were described as lazy, lavish spenders with “beetle brows.” “The Communistic uprising had died through decapitation,” wrote the Globe-Democrat, “and the police succeeded in driving the rank and file of the movement to their holes.” 

Many small fines were issued for “disturbing the peace,” and some workers were sentenced to six months in the city workhouse — the same charges and punishments allotted to civil rights leaders a century later. Strike leaders like Lofgreen and Currlin were charged with felony rioting, which were dismissed in court that August for lack of evidence.

On the Tuesday following the strike, leaders of the St. Louis business community sponsored a vast military parade. Over five thousand armed men marched with sidewalks packed with onlookers. The business elites of the “leading enterprises of St. Louis” marched too. “The display of military force is a solemn warning to Internationalism, Communism and all other forms of disturbing ‘isms,’” wrote the Globe-Democrat.

Over the subsequent century, the history of the railroad strike would be officially suppressed and forgotten in public memory.

A year after the Great Strike, 20 letters arrived on 20 desks across St. Louis, inviting captains of industry to “attend a meeting of prominent gentlemen” whose objective was to promote “the interests of St. Louis.”

In early July of 1877, Alonzo Slayback was out of town during the strike. He’d been occupied by an intense legal battle within the Bar Association, a conflict that somehow dissipated or was rendered moot as he left St. Louis for vacation in Minnesota around the start of the St. Louis Society. His travel plans were listed in the newspaper.

A year after the big strike, on October 6, 1878, amid a new trolley workers’ action, the engraved stamp image of the Veiled Prophet appeared in the Missouri Republican. This was Slayback’s “stroke of genius,” as he put it in his diary the night before. “The above steel engraving represents the original Veiled Prophet himself,” the paper read. “The artist has caught very cleverly the expression of benignant firmness on his countenance, and shown with rare fidelity the dignity of his attitude.”

The character in the image is a clown-like figure armed with a rifle, a pistol, and a bowie knife tucked in his white-cloak waistband. He has a triangular nose and wears a conical hat. A white handkerchief is wrapped around his neck, and a third rifle is leaned against the darkness of the black background, well within reach. The etching of the first Veiled Prophet is sending a clearly hostile message, and the article confirms this, clarifying that the Prophet will soon mount chariot, and parade through town. “It will be readily observed from the accoutrements of the Prophet that the procession is not likely to be stopped by street cars or anything else.”

In the years that followed, the Veiled Prophet would become the central mascot of the St. Louis elite. He would be misinterpreted as a Santa Claus character, or an old wizard who presides over a traditional debutante ball, but the Veiled Prophet’s true origins are as a Ku Klux character. He was invented and deployed from a place of fear and uncertainty, and was a direct response to the St. Louis Commune — an interracial show of force by the city’s workers.

Reprinted with permission from The Veiled Prophet: Secret Societies, White Supremacy, and the Struggle for St. Louis by Devin Thomas O’Shea, published by Haymarket Books. © 2026 by Devin Thomas O’Shea. All rights reserved.

Buy This Book

A few days later, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey used the bicentennial against Ford. “In 1776,” he declared, “the American people proclaimed their independence and threw out the British Tories. In 1976, the American people will once again affirm our independence and vote out the Republican Tories!” When Carter defeated Ford in November, the two largest states he won and the two largest that flipped from Republican in 1972 to Democratic in 1976 were New York and Pennsylvania. These were home to the two largest urban centers that Ford had most greatly disappointed in the lead-up to the birthday celebration: the Big Apple and the Bicentennial City. There were many reasons that Carter defeated Ford, but one that has not received much attention was Ford’s mishandling of the bicentennial, the Bicentennial City, and the Bicentennial City’s mayor; another was Carter’s successful presentation of himself, in the aftermath of Watergate and in the context of the bicentennial, as an honest and moral leader who would honor the nation’s founding principles, in contrast to the Republican president elected in 1968 and 1972.

Before and after Ford’s defeat, political dissenters challenged official bicentennial commemorations in ways big and small. The Peoples Bicentennial Commission was in the forefront of complaints about commercialization, but others had similar concerns. In November, historian Jesse Lemisch reported in the New Republic that his students in a class on the American Revolution and its commemoration had responded enthusiastically to an assignment that asked them to find examples of free or cheap “Bicentennial Schlock.” Lemisch’s conclusion was that “Bicentennial Schlock” was “the Watergate of patriotism: a healthy demystification which makes us wisely cynical and distrustful of many things that we should have been distrustful of before.” He continued, “The Bicentennial made American history look ridiculous, and there is certainly much in our history which deserves reconsideration.” At the same time, Lemisch argued that “there is much in the American past that we have reason to want to commemorate and celebrate.” Lemisch believed that “many of us who are ambivalent about the American heritage” were “prepared to be moved by the Bicentennial,” but the schlock his students collected “kills genuine sentiment.” His conclusion was that “since Schlock was the Bicentennial’s most pervasive manifestation and perhaps its most enduring heritage, it almost seems, emotionally speaking, as if there were no Bicentennial at all.”

One of the largest counter-bicentennial protests took place in Washington, where the Peoples Bicentennial Commission anticipated that 250,000 people would participate in its Independence Day Rally for Economic Democracy. “We will be demonstrating for economic justice and for independence from Big Business and Big Government,” Common Sense editor Ted Howard proclaimed. The day’s activities began with an interdenominational religious service at the Jefferson Memorial. The theme, “The Year of Jubilee,” was based on a biblical passage “calling for the redistribution of a nation’s wealth every 50 years for the purpose of the achievement of a just, humane and equitable society.” Activists then marched to a rally at the Capitol, where speakers included Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, Barry Commoner, Jane Fonda, Philip Foner, Tom Hayden, Dolores Huerta, Ted Howard, Jesse Jackson, Flo Kennedy, Jonathan Kozol, Jeremy Rifkin, and Benjamin Spock. Many participants signed the commission’s Declaration of Economic Independence and supported its call for a “Second American Revolution.” In the context of government warnings about terrorism, organizers had reduced their crowd-size expectations to 100,000. In the end, 5,000 to 25,000 people participated in the peaceful rally.

After many years of engaging with the bicentennial, African Americans participated in, dissented from, and boycotted the official celebrations. On July Fourth, the Washington Post cited Frederick Douglass’ words at the nation’s 76th birthday celebration: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary.” Later in July, Voter Education Project Director and future Rep. John Lewis wrote that while the wealthy had reasons to celebrate the bicentennial, “those of us who are poor, who are black or Spanish speaking, or native American, those of us who are the American majority, who are the three-fifths of the population who must subsist with only 10% of the national wealth, need to reexamine our concepts of participation in this nationalistic celebration.” Using coalitional language, Lewis continued, “It is time for blacks and all people who have been victimized by the violent American nightmare of exploitation, militarism, racism, and sexism to recognize our common plight and create our own revolution. We must rise above the distraction of the Bicentennial Celebration and work together to solve the problems which are eating away the very soul of our society.”

Native Americans also participated, dissented, and boycotted. Shortly before Independence Day, a Seneca leader told a New York Times reporter, “Instead of celebrating on July Fourth I’ll be crying, and why shouldn’t I? What did they do except massacre us? They took all our resources, all our lands.” A woman nearby stated, “The white people have taken all our pleasure, all our culture.” Another added, “They even took our language.”

Pacific Islanders joined Native Americans in calling attention to the hypocrisy of celebrating a colonial power’s anticolonial origins. During the week that the United States was celebrating Independence Day, separatists from the Marshall and Palau Islands, administered by the United States within the UN’s Trust Territory of the Pacific, called on the United Nations and the United States to grant them independence. One of their leaders told the UN Trusteeship Council, “At a time when the United States was celebrating the end of colonial rule by Britain, it should not play the role of ‘colonizer’ and compel the 27,000 Marshallese to tie their political future to those of the other islands.” The United States, he insisted, should not retain its “colonial stranglehold” over the islands. The Marshall Islands and Palau later achieved independence and signed “free association” compacts with the United States.

Independence advocates for another U.S. colony did not achieve their goals during 1976 but received a valuable expression of support on July 1, when California Rep. Ron Dellums introduced a Puerto Rican self-determination resolution in the House. Reminding the United States that in 1776 it had “made a commitment to the principles that all colonial people have the inalienable right to self-determination and the right to assume their place as free and independent states,” the resolution declared “that all powers and authorities presently exercised by the three branches of government of the United States … over the territory of Puerto Rico are hereby relinquished and transferred … to the people of Puerto Rico.” Celebrated on the left, the resolution was not passed by Congress.

Many women hoped that the bicentennial might prompt political breakthroughs, especially after the groundbreaking presidential campaigns of Shirley Chisholm and Patsy Mink in 1972. Many feminists, however, were disappointed that the woman who gained the most attention for a presidential run in 1976 was Ellen McCormack, who ran on an antiabortion platform. Dixy Lee Ray was elected governor of Washington, doubling the number of women holding that office; the other was Ella Grasso of Connecticut. Bella Abzug of New York and Patsy Mink of Hawaii lost their Senate campaigns, keeping the number of female senators at 0. As for the House, after the 1976 elections, the number of women dropped from nineteen to eighteen. In a further sign of trouble, no state ratified the ERA [Equal Rights Amendment] in the second half of 1976, destroying the momentum that had been building since 1972.

LGBTQ people were not invited to participate as such in the official celebrations, but many crashed the parties. In July, Lesbian Tide, published in Los Angeles, featured a drawing of a sideways U.S. flag, with the stripes representing prison bars, a human figure escaping, and a caption declaring “freedom!” The front cover of the summer issue of Lesbian Voices, published in San Jose, depicted an image of a U.S. flag with the words “Lesbian Nation” (the title of Jill Johnston’s 1973 book) on the stripes. The back cover featured the flag with intersecting female symbols replacing the stars. Inside the issue were the lyrics of “Glory, Lesbian Nation,” designed to be sung to the tune of “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the day,” the song began, “When all Lesbians are united and we turn the whole world gay / And when we have converted them, converted they shall stay / Our truth is marching on!” The issue also featured a drawing of a finger pointing at the four presidents on Mount Rushmore and a sign that declared “Happy Birthday, America!” The caption explained that “homosexuals received a Bicentennial present from the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 6 to 3 that States may prosecute and imprison consenting adults for homosexual acts.”

LGBTQ people also confronted other forms of bicentennial censorship. In July, the Advocate reported that “the sexual revolution now has its own flag motif: a red, white and blue graphic cock.” The design featured “a starry-blue pair of balls and a red-and-white striped barber pole shaft topped with an enormous red acorn.” Kerry X. LeBre of New York was “the irreverent designer,” and the image was for sale on posters, T-shirts, buttons, cards, flags, and needlepoint kits. In August, however, the Advocate reported that the image was not welcome in Provincetown, a popular gay travel destination in Massachusetts. Categorizing LeBre’s image as pornographic and unpatriotic, the police chief had ordered stores to stop selling it and people on the streets to take off the shirts. The Advocate quipped that under-the-counter sales were now exploding. Subsequent issues featured advertisements for merchandise using the image; one item was marketed as “the T-shirt of the decade” and “banned in Provincetown.” The international LGBTQ press had fun with this new example of American puritanism; a headline in Montreal read, “Un Poster Antipatriotique,” and one in Australia declared, “Gay Patriotism Banned in Provincetown.” The Australian article reported that the design had “more wit and good humor than most Bicentennial items on the market,” describing its “American primitive style” as “charming rather than lewd.” 

As 1976 came to a close, the Washington Post released an editorial, “The Future of History.” At the recent annual convention of the American Historical Association, C. Vann Woodward had reflected on “the great American birthday party.” The nation was “aging,” Woodward argued, and losing its sense of “innocence” and “invincibility.” According to the Post, “much the same could be said about the historical profession.” The “job crisis in academia,” which was especially grave in the liberal arts, had “shattered many historians’ faith in the tangible rewards of scholarship,” and there was also “great controversy about the content of history courses and the very nature of the historians’ craft.” The Postfound it “ironic” that “in the bicentennial year, the professional analysts of the past should be so troubled.” New attention to ethnicity, gender, popular culture, and “other fashionable themes” had demonstrated the discipline’s “vitality,” but “skeptics and pessimists” were worried that “just as the ‘old history’ could be dull and limited, the ‘new history’ could be swamped by triviality, confusion over methods and a self-defeating desire for ‘relevance.’” The Post thought the critics had a point: history courses in elementary and secondary schools and in community colleges were now “more appealing and provocative” but “at considerable cost in terms of students’ understanding of historical context and basic facts and dates.”

On the bright side, the Post argued that the job crisis had “compelled historians to look beyond their ivory towers and seek better relations with the less-learned world outside.” There was a “surge of interest” in “teaching outside the universities, historic preservation, public and corporate records work, museum management, local history, and genealogy.” One university had launched a doctoral program in public history; another was developing a master’s program on archives. More generally, there was new interest in writing for broader audiences and helping to “popularize” the past. “Thus,” the Post concluded, “the professional custodians of the past are becoming less stuffy and self-indulgent, even as the public is growing more sensitive to the real richness and rewards of historical inquiry.”

Many historians undoubtedly disagreed with some of the Post’s claims, especially if they did not work at elite institutions; if they were part of the discipline’s long tradition of writing for the general public; and if they did not appreciate the suggestion that histories of ethnicity, gender, culture, and “other fashionable themes” were “confused” and “trivial.” Those who had heard Woodward’s address also might have noted that the editorial missed his concluding paradox, that the “aging” nation was showing signs of “a refusal to grow up.” But if the bicentennial had encouraged greater public awareness of the “rewards of historical inquiry,” there was indeed something to celebrate as the national birthday concluded.

Reprinted with permission from Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s by Marc Stein, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Buy This Book

Want to keep reading about the 250th? Here is Bruce W. Dearstyne on how Calvin Coolidge celebrated the United States’ 150th anniversary, and Marc Egnal on the historiography of the causes of the American Revolution. Find even more to explore on Bunk.

The Royal Dockyards Samuel entered as an apprentice were a patchwork of modern labor protections and ancient rights. They had a form of pension and a form of tenure (workers could generally count on lifetime employment). Workers had significant power, collectively, over the timing and intensity of their work. They lived in longstanding craft communities composed of friends and family, with centuries-old traditions. When managers threatened their pay or working conditions, shipbuilders reacted with well-coordinated strikes as well as quieter forms of subversion, like fudging paperwork to increase pay. They took care of each other and for the most part, within trades, made the same wage — an egalitarian tendency they defended proudly.

The yards were far from perfect, of course. Apprentices often suffered grievously, and egalitarianism often existed only within trades — shipwrights did not stand up for ropemakers, for instance. The work was hard, and the hours long. But it was one of the best places in England to be a worker.

The dockyard was a tight-knit and well-organized proletarian community brave enough to repeatedly and illegally strike and win. Samuel, however, was a lawyer’s son and the stepbrother of a future parliamentarian. The common men of the yards probably resented him, all stiff-backed in his fine clothes, a lawyer’s son who had parachuted in from the bourgeoisie because he liked ships but was more comfortable with a protractor than an adze. And he resented them in turn — slouched in their tradition, designing the most complicated weapons in the world by eye-balling it, working with rules of thumb instead of rules of math. His work ethic and attitude set him apart from the other elite apprentices as well. He refused to skip or slow work, as they often did, and was dedicated to his craft.

In the dockyard, Samuel developed the twin convictions that most anything could be done better than it was currently being done, and that he could figure out how this was possible. Scientific methods — examining, testing, comparing, and developing theories — were the means he relied upon in every area of work. While he learned shipbuilding from artisans and from hands-on experience, he also sought to advance knowledge of it in new ways. A private shipyard operator, in conversation with Jeremy, described Samuel’s work as a “second branch” of shipbuilding, better called “ ‘computing’ or ‘comparing’ or some such word.”

Like Samuel, Jeremy did not fit quite right in his own profession — law. Skeptical of fuzzy concepts like “natural rights,” as well as the blurry institutions that supposedly guarded them, Jeremy came to detest the legal system he had trained for. Instead of England’s common law, which relied heavily on judicial precedent, Jeremy preferred a system of civil law — a central body of codes, a scientific rule set for a scientific age. Jeremy’s worldview mirrored Samuel’s, and they developed their work and their philosophies together. 

In 1775, Royal Dockyards shipwrights went on strike against a new work program developed along “self-interest” lines. John Montagu, fourth Earl of Sandwich, had a simple plan to replace workers: pay was to be tied to productivity. The fastest workers would be paid more to get more work out of them, and based on the resulting improvements, the rest of the workforce could be fired to cut costs. In this way, Montagu hoped to fire half the shipwrights of the Royal Dockyards. Workers denounced this task work as “progressive suicide on our Bodies” and proudly rejected individual self-interest in favor of a semi-egalitarian, communal ethic. Dockyard artisans demanded an across-the-board pay raise, not mass firings and harder work for the rest.

They pursued these demands with petitions and strikes, coordinated across England. It took several months, but their strike halted Montagu’s plans. But workers did not have the last word. It is unclear exactly how Samuel felt about the strike, but it is not hard to guess. Samuel spent some of the strike period on a family trip to France, but he was certainly aware of it and was present in the dockyards when the strikes began in June. 

The fact that the brothers were enemies of the existing “system of management” in courts and dockyards did not make them friends of shipwrights or prisoners. Jeremy opposed the vicious executions Britain conducted under what was known as the “Bloody Code,” but he proposed prisons for the poor instead of death. Samuel wanted the dockyards to be better managed, but for the purposes of the state rather than workers.

Both wished to optimize rather than replace existing hierarchies. Jeremy’s editor John Bowring quotes him as saying that in this era, he “never suspected that the people in power were against reform.” They only needed “to know what was good in order to embrace it.” In a slavery-funded empire that maintained power by the hangman’s noose, his naivete was stunning … and convenient. If all those in power needed to do good was a little knowledge, men like Jeremy were the solution.

Reformers rather than revolutionaries, they hoped to wield rather than challenge imperial power. As America rose up, the brothers fled Britain and headed for imperial Russia — Samuel first, in 1780, followed by Jeremy in 1786. There, Empress Catherine the Great wielded nominally absolute power, although in practice she was constrained by court politics and other forces in the state. In Russia, Samuel believed that he could practice his new science of shipbuilding unhindered by organized workers and entrenched bureaucracy. Jeremy, meanwhile, hoped that Catherine was the answer to his dreams of sweeping aside convoluted legal traditions: he believed that she could in a single stroke make the sweeping changes he wished to see. Russian autocracy, the Benthams imagined, could be a shortcut.

They could bypass institutions and authorities, customs and rights, and make labor and law as they should be with a wave of the empress’s hand.

Imagine for a moment that you are a Russian worker in St. Petersburg in late 1782. Your job is to drive piles into the ground using a towering contraption of weights and pulleys. By pulling on connected ropes, you and a squad of others lift a heavy weight and then release it to ram a pile into the ground for construction work, building piers and foundations. The work is immensely taxing, and it produces a natural rhythm: heavy pulling, brief rest.

One day a British man in his twenties marches into your workplace with a design for a machine supposedly meant to solve all of the problems with your work. Perhaps his proposals will protect your aching back. But no, Samuel Bentham’s problems are your employer’s problems, not your problems. Samuel has been traveling the country consulting for wealthy elites on how to optimize their estates; the previous year he worked on salt mines. He would like you to work faster and believes you are engaged in “habitual skulking.” But one man’s skulking is another man’s rest. The natural rhythm of pile-driving provides plenty of reasons for breaks, and your role in that rhythm makes it easier to create time for them.

Samuel has proposed a machine that would “put an end” to this rest by using you and your coworkers’ weight as well as your strength. His contraption is easier to move from point to point, which makes construction faster. Samuel’s first problem was not the efficiency of the machine, it was the efficiency of the workers — its entire purpose was to address skulking, according to his wife Mary’s later summary. While we do not have a diagram of Samuel’s pile-driving machine, Mary described it as “a kind of ladder which yielded downwards on every step that the men took,” presumably not unlike a StairMaster or a treadmill. This invention was one of the first in a series of contraptions he designed to control workers.

Samuel’s pile-driving machine was only the beginning. Between 1780 and 1791, his career took him far and wide across Russia, where he consulted on everything from salt mines to glassworks. Imperial Russia in this period was dominated by powerful nobles like Grigory Potemkin, a prince, lover, and favorite of the empress who directed Russian expansion onto the steppes near the Caspian Sea. This meant conquering Indigenous people in the kind of colonial expansion more commonly associated with Atlantic empires. Russia was not a commercial capitalist empire like Britain, but Potemkin and nobles like him promoted the latest in technology and hoped to profit off it. This, of course, was made easier by the widespread use of convict labor.

Samuel’s unwillingness to consider what workers wanted, and his willingness to wield power over them, reflect a broader personal tendency of his: in both his work and his personal life, Samuel could be a poor listener. In early 1783 he informed Jeremy he had fallen “deeply in love” with Countess Sophia Dmitrievna Matiushkina. The relationship was troubled by opposition from her family, and Samuel made matters worse by failing to listen to Sophia’s advice on how to navigate that opposition. At one point she was so distraught by a plan of his involving a letter that she broke social protocol at a party, publicly grabbed him by the arm, and begged him not to deliver it.

He did anyway. If Samuel was unwilling to listen to the advice of someone he loved, he was certainly not going to seek the perspective of the pump workers affected by his pile-driving machine. Whether they might be comfortable with “skulking,” or what they might feel was fair to do about it, did not influence his decision-making.

Throughout his career, Samuel treated labor as an engineering challenge. If he could determine an objectively superior method for joining planks or firing cannons, then why not do the same for workers? Skulking was as objectively undesirable as timber waste. He did not seriously consider any perspectives that might have challenged his own. He entrusted only himself with the responsibility of changing the world. Samuel combined this scientific elitism with penal labor exploitation, serving imperialism and aristocratic profit, to develop the Panopticon. After Samuel gained the favor of Potemkin, he went to work at his facilities in Krichev, where Potemkin manufactured tools for Russia’s imperial conquests. Samuel’s job, first and foremost, was to build ships. The younger Bentham was a talented shipwright, but his knowledge of shipbuilding and other enterprises was useless without other men to actually do and manage the work. He therefore invited British artisans to Russia. When they arrived, Samuel soon found out that these workers brought with them their own assumptions about what work was and how it should be governed. They treated orders and schedules as suggestions more than commands.

These men were not acting unruly. Rather, they were operating according to a different set of rules: the semi-egalitarian artisan moral economy of tradition rather than the Benthams’ nascent science of management. Samuel and Jeremy had come to Russia because of its authoritarianism, and they were not about to create an egalitarian workplace within it. Accordingly, Samuel devised a system to control English workers, train Russian serfs, and surveil foremen.

It began with the central inspection principle: workers should be watched at all times, working within “a building so contrived as that the whole of the operations carried on in it should be under observation from its centre.” Every aspect of production could then be overseen with the minimum number of managers, which was both more efficient and in line with Samuel’s belief in “individual responsibility” — the consolidation of final administrative authority in one person. The all-seeing manager could identify workers who needed further training, problems in the production process, or skulking, with ease.

Functionally, this system was meant to minimize the will of anyone not at its center while magnifying and extending the central manager’s agency across the entire workplace. Central inspection began as a particular solution to labor problems in Russian manufacturing, but Samuel always had broader goals. In the next few years, Bentham’s activities ranged from helping Potemkin win a war against the Ottomans with experimental ships to building a strange worm-like vessel for Catherine’s 1787 trip through new territories. It was on that trip that Potemkin, according to legend, built fake villages full of happy peasants for the empress to look at with pride. These infamous “Potemkin villages” did not in fact exist, but if they had, it would have been Samuel Bentham who built them.

Between 1786 and 1787, Jeremy visited his brother in Russia. Like Samuel, he hoped to use the empire as a laboratory. He planned to win Catherine over to his designs for a comprehensive and entirely new legal code based on his mathematical morality. John Locke, Joseph Priestley, and Adam Smith had all tempered their views of calculable happiness with an inconsistent but real belief in rights and ethics. Jeremy avoided internal contradictions by abandoning these incalculable things altogether. Rights, in his formulation, were “nonsense upon stilts,” inefficient barriers that got in the way of social optimization through law. Even emotions could be reduced to math. “Passion calculates,” he insisted. Bentham expanded on Smith’s economic arguments while abandoning his ethics, just as he adopted Locke’s vision of self-interest without his vision of political rights.

Underlying this was an extreme adoption of Lockean psychological egoism. “Nature,” Jeremy wrote in 1789, “has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.” “Right and wrong,” he wrote, “[and] causes and effects, are fastened to their throne.” Behavior had to be predictable and controllable if it was going to be manipulated by calculation — and Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy, as it came to be known, was defined by cold calculation above all else. The right thing to do was whatever produced the most pleasure and the least pain for the largest number of individuals.

On the surface, this may not sound like a bad thing, and to someone in the Benthams’ position, a mathematical ethics had undeniable appeal. Philosophy seemed to create problems, while science and mathematics solved them. English intellectuals had already been calling for a calculated remaking of the world along empiricist principles, and rapid advances in science could only make a believer in this vision more confident in the possibility of achieving it. Bentham read the writings of, corresponded with, and met men stumbling through new discoveries: oxygen! Electricity! Steam power! Day by day, more and more of the world could be described by equations and manipulated by engineers. Jeremy hoped to do the same with law.

This was the motivation behind his plans for legal reform, which he meant to advance during his visit with Samuel in Krichev. Jeremy was not content to stew in these ideas or write a few pamphlets, but he was spectacularly unsuccessful in winning Catherine over to his schemes. For a practical philosopher, the introverted Jeremy was poor at advocating his ideas within the halls of power. He failed to finish his legal code before the opportunity to meet the empress arrived, and when it did, he made sure not to meet the woman on whom his plans hinged.

With his own plan foundering, he latched instead onto his brother’s promised labor control schemes. Working together, they developed the central inspection principle into the circular concept known as the Panopticon. In the hands of the philosopher and erstwhile jurist, Samuel’s idea became the foundation for an improvement, a project that channeled a century of political economists’ obsessions through the person of Jeremy Bentham into a building made to change the world. When Jeremy and Samuel returned to England, they brought this project home with them.

From Control Science: How Management Made the Modern World by Henry Snow. Copyright © 2026 by Henry Snow. Published by Verso. Used by permission of the publisher.

Buy This Book

Despite white New Yorkers’ vigilance, their fears of a slave rebellion came to fruition on April 6, 1712, when 20 or so African captives ran away and revolted. The freedom-seekers — most likely the Akan or “Coromantees” from present-day Ghana — torched Broadway to lure out a white enslaver “search party” and militiamen, as described by historian Max Speare. When the enslavers soon gained the upper hand in the ensuing battle, some of the rebels “took their own lives” while others hid from an “intense” manhunt. White men patrolled the streets and questioned any person “of African descent.” Some of the captured Africans were acquitted, but others were not so fortunate. New York Governor Robert Hunter delighted in “the most exemplary punishment inflicted” — burning people alive, hangings, and “one broke on the wheele,” referring to the horrific torture machine that slowly crushed bones. In the aftermath of the 1712 rebellion, New York continued to scrutinize its slave police laws and eventually came up with “Lantern Laws,” which required white New Yorkers to arrest any Black person caught out and about at night without a lantern. New York’s enslavers looked to law, violence, and vigilance to stamp out the ember of slave rebellions.

The lesson of the 1712 Coromantee uprising was that a slave rebellion somewhere was a slave rebellion everywhere. It was the beginning of an age of slave rebellions. In 1731, a West African named “Samba” was murdered for supposedly planning a revolt against French enslavers in New Orleans. The Stono Rebellion in Charleston occurred just a few years later. Another rumored insurrection engulfed New York in 1741. Two more rebellions broke out in French Louisiana in the 1790s. Richmond, Virginia, murdered over 20 suspected rebels in 1800 in what was known as Gabriel’s Rebellion.

In 1802 and 1805, North Carolina was shaken with fears of rebellions. Virginia convulsed similarly in 1805. In 1811, the massive German Coast Rebellion saw dozens of enslaved people rise up in Louisiana, and a year later a massive revolt hit Cuba. Then there was the suspected Christmas Day rebellion in Charleston in 1822, Nat Turner’s storied Southampton, Virginia, rebellion in 1831, and several others. Taken on their own, each of these was a rebellion. But taken together, they were battles in a “war” — a “race war” about the “relations between masters and their vassals,” as historian Vincent Brown put it in Tacky’s Revolt. For both sides the stakes were high. Enslaved people sought autonomy and independence. Enslavers fought both to preserve their system of economic exploitation and to stave off racial apocalypse.

For enslavers in the British colonies, the age of slave rebellions brought a renewed focus on slave policing. In decades past, enslavers had classified runaways as threats to public order, and they experimented with techniques to prevent, apprehend, and punish those who tried to escape bondage.

As slave rebellions captured enslavers’ imaginations, they embraced another type of policing — one in which government institutions would play a more important role than the deputized enslaver acting on their own.

It was a tacit admission that no single enslaver could handle things on their own. Rather, they acknowledged the need for the government — for public authority — to come to their aid. Enslavers hung their hopes on the slave patrol, the public policing institution that deployed force to sniff out and snuff out rebellions. There was no doubt that these slave patrols were emergency measures — meant to prevent the most feared of all emergencies. But if the emergency never receded, then it became the norm. So, too, did the slave patrol.

The slave patrol was one answer to a broader question that had vexed English-speaking colonists and their connections back home: How should government maintain law and order? Around the time when British colonizers were invading North America, overworked executioners in England’s cities and counties administered the death penalty to thousands. Legislators grew increasingly concerned about crimes such as treason and sedition. Historian Andy Wood described one 1549 official’s plan to crush threats to internal order: public executions, the decapitation of corpses, and the public display of the severed heads; troublesome clergy were to be hanged from their church’s spires and left to rot; warnings to servants and tenants of dire consequences if they stepped out of line; heightened “readiness” for “constables, bailiffs and mayors”; the appointment of a force of executioners. The key to this system was securing the buy-in of the local elites; for when the troubles came, the elites would be the eyes and ears of public vigilance as well as the physical force that would help the sheriffs and conduct executions. There was no “permanent apparatus on which to depend” — nothing like modern-day police departments, SWAT teams, or state police. Instead, when the government needed force, it mobilized citizens, especially the trusted, “better” sort who would have a vested stake in preserving the status quo.

This was the context of policing when English-speaking enslavers defined a new crime against public order that accompanied the mass importation of African enslaved people into the colonies in the late 1600s: the slave insurrection.

The term “insurrection” comes from the Latin verb insurgo, which means “to rise up from within.” Insurrection was not inherently connected to slavery, as we first see the term “insurrection” back in 1450, when a man named Jack Cade led a movement against elite corruption in Kent, England. The people elected Cade as the captain of their posse comitatus — or “the power of the county” — and battled the King’s army for about a month before collapsing.

The most important part of the crime of insurrection was that insurrectionists like Jack Cade wanted to replace the nobles’ government with one of their own making. This was scary enough for English nobles facing uprisings by angry, oppressed peons. But insurrection took on an added racial dimension when it was applied to slavery in the English plantation colony of Barbados in the late 1600s. Insurrections seemed to lurk everywhere, especially with “Runaway Negres” who had taken refuge in caves and forests and who plagued the planters with nighttime thefts before escaping “undiscern’d.” Historian Jason T. Sharples has studied the mindset of the Barbadian planters who first began applying the insurrection concept; he notes that when planters “turned English ears to African voices,” “they heard them imperfectly” through their own preconceived fears of the very people they were enslaving. Given the planters’ own horrific violence against the Africans they were trying to subjugate, they thought, why would the Africans not seek retribution? This idea — that slave rebellions would bring about a racial apocalypse and replace white dominion with Black rule — was the big reason why enslavers preferred to classify slave rebellions as “insurrections.” And it was why enslavers would become preoccupied with the problem of trying to police insurrections.

The Barbadian planters turned to the militia to address the emergency of slave rebellions. The colony’s 1660 law gave militia captains the authority to temporarily conscript up to 20 men to “pursue and apprehend” any groups of escaped slaves who were considered potential troublemakers. The militia was authorized to use as much force as necessary to capture “members of these bands ‘dead or alive.’ ” If a full-scale “insurrection” unfolded, the colony’s governor was directed “to declare martial law,” to include the summary execution of wrongdoers. Enslavers need not have worried about losing the value of the executed slaves because Barbados would compensate them “from the public treasury.” With nothing to lose financially, the colonial government hoped the planters would do their part and come forward with “the rebellious plans of their slaves.” Even with these measures in place, however, the Barbadian planters still confronted rumors of slave rebellions in 1675 and 1692. After the latter rebellion, a military court sentenced the putative rebels to be executed and decapitated and “their decapitated heads would be placed on a pole.” This brutal crackdown of a slave rebellion taught a lesson that would make an impression among at least a few who soon emigrated to the mainland.

Indeed, some Barbadian planters were moving to what they hoped were greener pastures in the Carolinas, and they brought with them their fears of slave rebellions. With the 1704 “an act to Settle a Patroll,” the South Carolinian enslavers and planters who ran the colony’s General Assembly identified a new and terrifying threat: In the event that an “enemy” or foreign power attacked South Carolina, the white men would get pulled away to the front. So, who would watch over the slaves? And what if opportunistic slaves decided to join forces with the attacking foreign “enemy”? Sally Hadden, the leading historian of slave patrols, explains the South Carolinians logic as follows: “The colony needed two military forces,” one that served as “a militia to repel foreign enemies,” and another that kept guard over the enslaved people who were potential insurrectionists within the colony. This latter guard was the slave patrol, and its goal was, per the text of the law, “to prevent such insurrections and mischiefs as from the great number of slaves we have reason to suspect may happen” if the white men were away.

Once assembled, a force of ten patrollers would “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” in their jurisdiction, to arrest any enslaved people who did not belong there or who did not have a pass. That patrollers had legal authority to enter private property reflects just how seriously South Carolinians took the threat of insurrection. White enslavers, whose own eyes and ears were trusted to surveil their own slaves, nonetheless believed that their police power needed to be robust enough to invade private property in times of crisis.

This provision, though, was also a pragmatic concession to the reality that South Carolinian enslavers were committed to a system of enslavement that required enslaved people to be mobile — moving between enslaver properties and within them. The slave patrol was an attempt to police enslaved people’s insurrectionary potential within this context.

South Carolinian enslavers’ fears that enslaved people would rebel while the white population was distracted with a foreign adversary only continued to grow during the lengthy war from 1702 to 1713 between Britain and Spain that spilled over into North America. British minders in South Carolina tried to use the Yamassees’ and Creeks’ formidable firepower against Spanish Florida. But the Yamassees and Creeks had other ideas and instead targeted rival Indian villages. In the 1711 Tuscarora War, a rash Swiss colonist named Baron Christophe von Graffenreid provoked a Tuscarora raid that killed more than one hundred settlers, including the imprudent Baron himself. In January 1711, South Carolina dispatched a force to attack the Tuscaroras, who had hunkered down in a formidable fort, which seemed eerily like something the English would have built. According to John Barnwell, who led the campaign against the Tuscaroras, the fort had “port holes” that could be opened from which to fire and stakes lining the ground around the fort “to run into people’s legs.” Apparently, the Tuscarora warriors learned these techniques from Harry, “a runaway negro.” In what we might call Harry’s Insurrection, the Tuscaroras held out for months before being defeated.

The Tuscarora War as well as the Yamasee War two years later — in which South Carolinians retreated toward Charleston until Cherokees came to their aid — would likely have triggered the slave patrol alarm. Manpower was already desperately low, and reports from the front lines noted that the South Carolinians could not muster enough men to confidently confront the Tuscaroras. And those men who did arrive and prove willing to fight were “badly clad and equipped.” One can imagine that the situation back home was little better. Or perhaps it was the case that the shortages at the front were the result of white men exploiting a “loophole” that shielded slave patrollers from service on the front lines? As white South Carolinians pondered new ways to guarantee their safety from both enslaved people and nearby Natives, they began to ask hard questions about those who were shirking their duty to the public. These militia dodgers tended to be “the choicest and best men, who screen themselves” from combat roles.

The solution was to give the colony the power to decide which white men would do what duties. A 1721 militia reform law let the militia commanding officers decide who would fight and who would patrol. At least for the time being, military necessity trumped the rampant fears of slave insurrection. Thus began a pattern. South Carolina would repeatedly have to choose between defending the colony from enemies, foreign and domestic. The white rulers of South Carolina would relax their fears of slave insurrections as the most recent insurrection — or suspected insurrection — faded from memory. And as they did so, they also relaxed their slave patrol laws. This was also the inevitable result of the changing nature of slavery during these years as enslavers began to use a “task system” that gave enslaved people “free time” after the completion of a task, as historian Justene Hill Edwards explains. Enslaved people often used this “free time” to buy and sell things in the local informal economic marketplace. Here enslaved people’s agency powered their mobility in and outside of markets.

By 1734, in the face of enslaved people’s expanding mobility and economic agency, a backlash was brewing. The legislature conceded that the patrol system wasn’t “keeping all slaves in due order.” 

In late 1739 famed evangelist George Whitefield was heading south from Philadelphia to do the Lord’s work at Calvinist visionary John Wesley’s Christ’s Church in Savannah in the colony of Georgia. Whitefield believed he had been called to tend to Georgia’s Black population, and he built the “Bethesda” orphanage that still stands today on the grounds of a private school. Whitefield was no abolitionist, and he would join a movement to legalize slavery in Georgia — where it had been prohibited since 1735 — and come to own his own plantation. But he did believe white enslavers in the colonies needed to be gentler to their charges.

In the late hours of January 2, 1740, Whitefield and his traveling party were making their way through South Carolina, en route to Savannah. The men were tired and desperately lost. When they finally “saw a Light,” “two of my Friends went up to it, and saw a Hutt full of Negroes.” Whitefield’s friends were startled but nonetheless asked the slaves if they knew if their host lived nearby — they did not. When Whitefield’s friends returned to the main group and told their story, one of the others spoke up. He had heard that slaves had recently risen up in rebellion nearby. The friend “inferr’d, that these Negroes might be some of those who lately had made an Insurrection in the Province, and were run away from their Masters.” Panic suddenly set in. George Whitefield thought he had blundered his way into the middle of the Stono Rebellion.

The Stono Rebellion of 1739 was well over by the time George Whitefield found himself in South Carolina. But his fears were understandable. The rebellion would long live in the memory of enslaved people and white enslavers in South Carolina and beyond. For Black Americans — free and enslaved — the rebellion would become a poignant memory in the collective remembrance of resistance against enslavers — the remembrance of a war, in fact, that would survive all the way into the 20th century with a man named George Cato, reputed to have been related to the leader of the Black forces during Stono, Cato. “My granddaddy and my daddy tell me plenty ’bout it,” George Cato would recall. Cato was the “slave commander.” “Commander Cato” was remembered to have said, “We don’t lak slavery. We start to jine de Spanish Floriday.”

For white society, however, Cato was not a “commander” but an insurrectionist, and the Stono Rebellion was the Stono Insurrection. Angry and embarrassed that they had allowed Stono to happen on their watch, the enslaver elite in the General Assembly immediately went to work revitalizing slave policing, especially slave patrols. South Carolina’s 1740 slave code runs 20 pages long — most other laws of the time are much shorter. The law defined slaves to be “all negroes and Indians” other than those already free, and it made clear that in the future, society “presumed that every negro” was a slave. It legalized murdering slaves who fought back against white people trying to catch those without passes. Justices of the peace were authorized to invade plantations if they suspected that slaves were hiding guns. Those harmed chasing after runaways would be remunerated. The law explained how slaves would be tried for crimes, and it specified the death penalty for felonies and capital cases and “any corporal punishment” just short of murder for lesser crimes. Section 17 of the law made “insurrection” a specific category of capital crime. Realizing that these new provisions might make local officers very busy with the whippings and killings of slaves, the Assembly offered the following horrific remunerative calculations: 25 shillings for each act of “whipping or other corporal punishments not extending to life,” and £5 “for any punishment extending to life.” And to prevent delays in administering this torture, the Assembly allowed officers to seize other nearby slaves to do the terrible deeds on their behalf.

Free Black residents found guilty of hiding runaways faced stiff fines, and if they could not pay, they would be sold into slavery. The most important injunction thrown at white masters was that they, too, faced a fine unless they could ensure vigilance over their enslaved people by always having at least one “white person” on the property.

Together, the slave code and patrol law were meant to bring a brutal restoration of enslavers’ law and order to South Carolina and to turn the page, both on these years of sharpened resistance by enslaved people and on lax habits of white policing and vigilance. A curious provision in the slave code made this abundantly clear. Recalling that during the Stono insurrection “several negroes did lately rise in rebellion, and did commit many barbarous murders,” the law granted immunity to white people who summarily executed enslaved people “in suppressing the said rebels.” They did it “for their own security,” noted the South Carolina General Assembly. Even if they killed other people’s slaves, “all and every act, matter and thing” was now “declared lawful.” The Assembly analogized the summary executions to the acts of public officers. It was as if the “rebellious negroes had undergone a formal trial and condemnation” and were then executed. The white men who murdered slave insurrectionists — real or merely suspected — were judge, jury, and executioner.

From White Power: Policing American Slavery by Gautham Rao. Copyright © 2026 by Gautham Rao. Published in the W. Hodding Carter III Books imprint of the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

Buy This Book

After establishing his patriotic credentials, Choate argued in letters to Oklahoma’s congressional representatives and to President Truman that Oklahoma’s climate and geography were ideal for the “International Capitol of the World,” while noting in a letter to John D. Rockefeller, a chief advocate of the UN, that “since the prime motive of the [UN] was for the protection and help to the minority nations or races, no more fitting and timely gesture could be made than by placing the World Capital here at a place formerly used as the seat of a Government of a minority Nation here in our own country.” A competing Oklahoma proposal came from Claremore, the home of Will Rogers, who died in 1938. The president of the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) wrote that Rogers was “a world citizen, and an ambassador of good will,” and therefore the Claremore site would be a “fitting tribute to him and in recognition of his world service.” In both of these proposals we see Native people situating themselves as citizens of the world, a world recently engulfed in a violent conflagration, a world soon to be rent by global tensions in the emerging Cold War. The Choctaws’ and Cherokees’ pursuit of the UN headquarters represents just one of the ways in which Native people imagined themselves and their minority nations becoming part of the postwar world order.

Indigenous citizens also had local concerns following the war, including securing the civil rights most other American citizens enjoyed and addressing endemic racism that denied them access to jobs, housing, and GI benefits. At the same time, Native people were forced to fight for their long-standing treaty rights that were under assault by a renewed coercive assimilation movement called “termination,” fueled by non-Native Americans’ perception that the Indian reservation was a socialistic or communistic space and thus an un-American space. The goal of this movement was to finally incorporate Native people into mainstream America by terminating all treaties that protected their reservations, settling all outstanding legal claims, and then relocating Native people into cities and rural communities.

The future of those reservations lay at the heart of Native Americans’ campaigns to secure the promise of citizenship embedded in the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act, the dual citizenship of both American and tribal citizenship. Throughout the 19th and into the 20th century, American politicians and reformers had sought to eliminate the “reservation system,” which they viewed as a haven for Native Americans’ “primitive” traditions as well as a barrier to white Americans’ access to their valuable land and resources. Attacks on the reservation system had intensified after World War I when American politicians considered Native Americans’ patriotism during the war as evidence that they wanted to leave their reservations for good. The events of World War II produced a new description of the reservation as a concentration camp. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t call internment camps for Japanese Americans “concentration camps” until 1942, as early as March 1940, a member of Congress compared an Indian reservation to a concentration camp by describing how “the white man took the Indians’ land, debauched their women, killed many of them, and herded the survivors in concentration camps which we now call Indian Reservations.” To cite one more example: In 1944, a congressional committee tried to repeal the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) so that Indians “may be assimilated into the American way of life and not be in the reservation like a concentration camp; for, after all, a reservation is only a step or two from a concentration camp.”

The term entered popular culture in Henry Miller’s 1945 book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, which offered a national origin story of settler colonialism in which Americans “began by poisoning the Indians with alcohol and venereal disease, by raping their women and murdering their children … When they had finally completed their work of conquest and extermination they herded the miserable remnants of a great race into concentration camps and proceeded to break what spirit was left in them.” Politicians seeking to terminate Indian reservations and open them to development used the terms “concentration camp” and “socialistic environment” into the 1950s to describe them as an oppressive and un-American place from which Native Americans needed to be “liberated” or “freed” in order for them to attain so­called full citizenship. Those criticizing reservations may have been right to point out the difficult economic conditions Indigenous citizens faced. Yet, in this narrative, they were seen as victimized by and imprisoned on reservations, from which they needed to be liberated. Native Americans, now, would have to defend the reservation as an ancestral homeland, as a sanctuary from white racism and discrimination, and as a sacred space that allowed them to maintain necessary cultural practices and religious rituals. Similar to Black Americans and other people of color, Native Americans fought to secure civil rights and benefits available to other American citizens, their activism animated by national service in World War II. They argued that they had earned the basic privileges of citizenship, especially voting rights, after meeting their obligations to the United States during the war.

Indigenous citizens had been advocating for suffrage for years in the states that did not allow them to vote. By 1937, a Department of the Interior report concluded that Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, North Carolina, Utah, and Washington denied voting rights to Native Americans, while noting that in southern states they faced poll taxes and literacy tests that limited their access to the polls. The report recommended challenging the constitutionality of the discriminatory provisions in the seven states that explicitly denied suffrage.

Native people had confronted these unconstitutional provisions as the world war drew them to foreign battlefields. In 1940, World War I veterans Fred Bauer and Jack Jackson (Eastern Cherokee) tried to register to vote in North Carolina but were rejected by county registrars despite meeting the state’s eligibility criteria. An outraged Cherokee council claimed that Cherokees’ inability to vote in state and national elections would preclude equal rights and fair treatment from county draft boards, which could fill their county draft quotas with Cherokees rather than whites. In its November 5, 1940, resolution, the council highlighted Cherokees’ willingness to serve their country by claiming that “there is not a more patriotic people to be found anywhere in this country,” and called for an independent draft board to ensure fair treatment.

The first major challenge to voter suppression after the war occurred in North Carolina. When 300 Eastern Cherokee veterans returned from service abroad, they qualified for education grants under the GI Bill of Rights and Veterans Administration training programs, but they remained unable to vote in the state. Having fought for freedom abroad, they insisted on getting it at home. During the fall of 1945, members of the Steve Youngdeer Post of American Legion 111 requested a hearing before the Jackson and the Swain County election boards to protest their denial of voting rights. The boards ignored their appeals. North Carolina required its voters to be able to read and write to a standard set by an election registrar. In May 1946, two groups of Eastern Cherokee veterans tried to register in the two counties, to no avail, despite reading from the North Carolina state constitution. Veterans complained that the Jackson County registrar told them that he was “under orders from the election board of Jackson County not to register Indians regardless of qualifications.” 

Facing such opposition, Cherokee officials turned to the governor and state attorney general for help, again to no avail. A visit to the two registrars by two FBI agents sent by the U.S. attorney general also failed to produce changes. But in early October, the two county election boards relented in the face of organized pressure from other American Legion posts and local newspapers, and agreed to register all Cherokees. The case represented just one of many in which Native veterans, animated by their national service, sought the benefits for which they had fought and their comrades had died overseas. Lumbee veteran James Locklear helped organize Native and Black citizens to fight for voting rights in North Carolina, arguing that “the ballot box was the way to change things.” Locklear spoke for many of his fellow Native and Black veterans when he said that he was no longer going to be “a second-class citizen. I had tasted … what it was like to be a first-class citizen. I was with whites and I had heard them talk about their opportunities, opportunities that I didn’t have.”

Other Native leaders employed this rhetoric of patriotic service in their campaigns to secure civil rights. In an August 1947 radio broadcast titled “Are Indians Getting a Square Deal?,” Navajo and Pueblo leaders claimed that justice was denied “so long as an Indian cannot vote for the government they must pay taxes to support and give their lives to defend.” Like tens of thousands of other Native people in the American Southwest, Ira Hayes (Pima), who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima in 1945, could not vote after the war.

In late 1947, Native activists in Arizona and New Mexico launched campaigns to attain those voting rights. Two Mohave-Apache men living on the Fort McDowell Reservation outside of Phoenix, Frank Harrison, an army veteran, and Harry Austin, the tribal chairman, sought to register as Democrats in Maricopa County in advance of the 1948 national elections. The county registrar, Roger Laveen, refused to register them because they were “persons under guardianship” according to the Arizona state constitution, a restriction upheld in the 1928 Porter v. Hall decision. Harrison and Austin filed a writ of mandamus to force Laveen to register them, asserting that “if they were denied the right to register and vote they would be deprived of the franchises, immunities, rights, and privileges of citizens which are guaranteed to them under the constitution and laws of both the United States and the State of Arizona.” NCAI and U.S. government amicus curiae briefs put pressure on the state to reverse the Porter v. Hall ruling. Citing these briefs and the President’s Committee on Civil Rights report’s condemnation of Arizona’s voting restrictions, the Arizona Supreme Court acknowledged that “the oldest and largest minority group” in the state, representing 11.5% of the population, had “served in the armed forces with pride and distinction.” In its ruling in Harrison v. Laveen, the court found no basis to support the use of guardianship to deny Native people their voting rights and overturned Porter v. Hall.

The NCAI also challenged New Mexico’s denial of suffrage to Native people based on its state constitution prohibiting access to the polls by “Indians not taxed.” Miguel H. Trujillo (Isleta Pueblo), a Marine veteran of World War II, a teacher at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, and a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, agreed to work with a group of attorneys to fight the state’s discriminatory practice; among them was Felix Cohen, who had assisted Harrison and Austin with their suit against the state of Arizona. Cohen wanted to highlight Trujillo’s military service to press for suffrage, recognizing that Arizona judges had emphasized Native people’s significant wartime contributions in their ruling.

In June 1948 Trujillo initiated the legal challenge by attempting to register to vote in Valencia County, just south of his Isleta Pueblo community. The recorder, Eloy Garley, refused to register him, citing the state constitution’s “Indians not taxed” clause, leading Cohen and two other attorneys to file an injunction in Santa Fe’s Federal District Court. After reviewing the evidence in Trujillo v. Garley, a three­judge panel issued a permanent injunction against New Mexico using that clause to deny Native people suffrage, arriving at the “inescapable” conclusion that the practice violated the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution and thus constituted “discrimination on the grounds of race.” Native people in New Mexico paid all taxes other New Mexico citizens paid, including state and federal income taxes, with the exception of taxes on reservation property; in addition, the state allowed African American and Latino citizens of the state who were not taxed to vote. It is important to note that it would take until 1962 for New Mexico to allow Native people to vote in its state elections. But the decision represented another important victory for Native voting rights.

On the heels of Trujillo’s successful suit in New Mexico, Idaho deleted from its state constitution the suffrage provision “Indians not taxed,” opening the polls to Native voters. Governments in Maine and Utah remained opposed to Indian suffrage until the mid-1950s. In September 1954, Maine’s legislature approved the Maine Suffrage for Native Americans Referendum, granting voting rights to the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy, but only in federal elections; they would have to wait until 1967 to vote for state representatives. Maine officials acted in part because they were motivated by assimilationist sentiments; one state senator argued that granting them suffrage was the best way to extend the “white man’s civilization” to them and thus solve “the Indian problem in the State of Maine.”

Utah officials disfranchised Indians on the basis of a state law claiming that Native people were not technically state residents because they lived on a reservation and could not understand the intricacies of state election law and white politics. Preston Allen (Uintah and Ouray) disagreed, filing suit in Allen v. Merrell. After the Utah Supreme Court upheld the state’s disfranchisement of Native people, the case wound its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which told the Utah State Supreme Court to revisit the issue, intimating that it had one choice to make. Under pressure, Utah’s state legislature relented and repealed the statute in 1957, becoming the last state to give Native people the national franchise.

The legal victories in Arizona and New Mexico generated enormous press coverage and inspired thousands of Native people to register. The Black newspaper Chicago Defender mentioned the decisions in a brief column titled “Democracy Wins a Round,” quoting the comments of NCAI secretary Ruth Muskrat Bronson, who called them “a smashing victory for civil rights of our oldest national minority.” The Defender wryly but also seriously noted in closing, “However may we add that while Indians have the right to vote in all states except one, they often find themselves in the position of a Negro who has the right to vote in Meridian, Mississippi, if you know what I mean.” Indeed, the courts had decided the issue, but, as with other sites of civil rights suppression, enforcing the decision would become the true test of the federal government’s resolve. In addition, what Native people would do with that right of suffrage remained in question.

The Navajo Nation newspaper Ádahooníłígíí, published in both English and Navajo to keep its citizens aware of important political events, called the New Mexico decision “a great step forward for all Indians,” and expressed hope that “someday soon there will be an Indian in the State governments here in Arizona and New Mexico. And maybe someday soon there will be Indians from out here in Congress. There is nothing to stop them now.” Another article in the issue stated that Navajos “must learn that we the people are the government … It is our own fault if we vote unwisely or fail to vote at all.” Accordingly, Ádahooníłígíí began to publish reminders about Navajo Tribal Council elections and provided information about upcoming state and national elections. During the 1951 council election, 87% of eligible voters participated, an increase of 82% in the number of voters from the 1946 council election. 

NCAI Executive Director Helen Peterson (Cheyenne-­Lakota Sioux) observed that during the 1950s Native people began voting and writing, calling and petitioning their congressional representatives. She highlighted Native voters’ impact on close elections in states such as Idaho, where democratic U.S. Senate candidate Frank Church won by 170 votes with support from Indigenous citizens. Peterson cited politicians who frequently heard from Native leaders concerned about legislation that affected them, leading members from both parties to court Native voters.

Gaining the franchise in states such as Arizona and New Mexico helps explain the rise in voting, but as importantly the rise in terminationist policies required Native people to be vigilant in defending their interests. Because of the Republican Party’s promotion of termination legislation, Native voters in 1954 and beyond leaned heavily toward Democratic Party candidates. In 1957, as termination pressures threatened the Navajo Nation, 12,000 Navajos living in New Mexico formed a voting bloc, leading many of them to register and vote for the first time. A Navajo spokesman explained the surge in interest: “The same group of politicians who didn’t want us to vote still make up New Mexico’s Congressional delegation. They’d sell us down the river in a minute if they thought it would enhance their chances of reelection.”

Adapted from Indigenous Citizens: Native Americans’ Fight for Sovereignty, 1776-2025. Copyright © 2026 by Paul C. Rosier. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Buy This Book

The government acted vigorously on its warrant against Pound after European hostilities ended. Until then, he tendered his talents to Mussolini in his Salò refuge. The poet wrote Fascist propaganda, dividing his time between Salò and Rapallo duties. He wrote for the Fascist press on Jews as “scum” or “illness,” as thousands of Italian Jews — among them Primo Levi — were corralled by Germans and their helpers, then crated away in trains. Pound sent his ideas and what newsworthy items came his way to Nazi news media and urged Italian editors not to use anything originating in the United States, such as articles by the “turd [Walter] Lippmann, JEW.” Pound extended advice to the Duce’s lieutenants on economic questions, belated fulfillment of his wish to counsel senior officialdom. He even recommended educational materials for the great man to peruse. 

Pound surrendered to U.S. military authorities in May 1945, when Italian partisans escorted him to an American counterintelligence center in Genoa, thence to the 6677th Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) north of Pisa. In the DTC’s maximum-security area, he was confined (25 days) to a steel cage and exposed to the elements. His health suffered; his mood sank. He was subsequently allowed a tent in the DTC’s medical compound with limited freedom of movement. During the succeeding months, Pound wrote Cantos LXXIV–LXXXIV, collectively remembered as the Pisan Cantos. He also translated into English a work (The Unwobbling Pivot and the Great Digest) that he earlier had composed in Italian on Confucianism, purportedly supportive of Fascist life. In November, he was repatriated to the United States, then arraigned on treason charges in federal court in Washington.

As his lawyer Julien Cornell hoped, Pound never stood trial. On the testimony of psychiatric specialists recruited by Cornell, the court judged Pound mentally unfit. The implications were ambiguous. On the one hand, this finding denied Pound a chance to explain his Radio Rome show, to his mind protected by the Constitution’s freedom-of-speech guarantee and which anyway did not harm Americans or aid their enemies. On the other hand, he escaped the risk of a guilty verdict and capital punishment, as meted out in January 1946 by British justice to William Joyce (“Lord Haw Haw”) for Berlin-based seditious broadcasts. Instead of that fate, Pound was incarcerated in Washington’s St. Elizabeths Hospital for the insane. He dubbed it the “bughouse.” There he remained until April 1958, when the petitioning of fellow poets, spearheaded by Archibald MacLeish and Robert Frost, led to his release.

During the St. Elizabeths years, Pound continued with his Cantos — Rock Drill, published 1955; Thrones, published 1959. He produced two books of Chinese translations, centered on Confucius and traditional poetry. He crafted versions of Sophocles’ Elektra and Women of Trachis. He wrote essays on literature, economics, and politics that journals and newspapers published. Of public life, he followed the doings of Senator Joe McCarthy (R, Wisconsin): “God bless McCarthy.” Pound lamented McCarthy’s hounding by the Jewish press and other “damned liars” who had earlier defamed Mussolini and Hitler. Upon hearing a radio speech by Abba Eban, Israel’s envoy to the United Nations, Pound again endorsed pogrom concepts. He cheered the rabble-rousing violence of white supremacist John Kasper.

During time in the “bughouse,” Pound received hundreds of visitors. Holding forth in monologues on poetry or politics, or reading from his own well of new and previous works, Pound entertained friends of longstanding, plus a cohort of fresh admirers. Those who paid homage, or merely wanted to steady his morale, included MacLeish, Eliot, Hemingway, William Carlos Williams, Cummings, H. L. Mencken, Langston Hughes, Kenneth Clark, James Dickey, Randall Jarrell, Stephen Spender, Thornton Wilder, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, Edith Hamilton, Jean Cocteau, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, and Thornton Wilder. The guests had to brace themselves whenever Pound ranted about Jewry or pronounced, with increasing vitriol, on African Americans. 

A controversy during Pound’s confinement erupted in 1949, when the Library of Congress bestowed on him its first Bollingen Prize in poetry for the Pisan Cantos (published in 1948). Cultural doyens, connected to the Partisan Review and the Saturday Review of Literature, were taken aback that an apologist for a wartime enemy of the United States should be celebrated. Representatives Jacob Javits (R, New York) and James Patterson (R, Connecticut) demanded a congressional inquiry. Despite such objections, the Bollingen awarding committee did not retreat. The jury of literati counted not only Pound’s devoted friend and 1948 Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot, but also Robert Lowell, W. H. Auden, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Penn Warren. Riding the New Criticism wave, they contended that the aesthetic and formal qualities of a poetic work should be evaluated without reference to the author’s character or biography. Artistic creations had their own autonomy and meaning.

In declaring the Pisan Cantos commendable, the Bollingen panelists necessarily discounted instances of anti-Semitic twist: “the yidd is a stimulant, and the goyim are cattle / in gt proportion and go to salable slaughter / with the maximum of docility.” Infelicities that troubled readers outside the Bollingen circle overflowed, as when Pound contrasted Vichy’s Marshal Pétain with (Jewish) Léon Blum, premier of France’s popular front government: “Pétain defended Verdun while Blum / was defending a bidet.” When touching on Italy, the Pisan Cantos mourned valiant Mussolini “crucified.”

Whatever their purported merit, the Pisan Cantos were more than a dirge for crumpled Fascism. They also reflected Pound’s anguish, and anticipated his retreat from the public stage.

From Canto LXXXI:

Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail …

Pull down thy vanity

How mean thy hates

Fostered in falsity,

Pull down thy vanity,

Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,

Pull down thy vanity,

I say pull down.

With wife and amanuensis, Marcella Spann, Pound in June 1958 sailed from New York on the Cristofero Colombo to Genoa. Upon regaining Italian soil, he raised his arm in Fascist salute. Once a verbal volcano, Pound in his decline fell into expansive silence. Allowing for occasional and brief public appearances, he existed unobtrusively. He traded long-suffering Dorothy Shakespear for the companionship of Olga Rudge, at his side from 1962 until his death in Venice. In 1964, he published an anthology of poetry, Confucius to Cummings.

Of his own poetry, he lost the nerve to write. He made desultory efforts at his Cantos, blending remorse with penance. The incendiary had burnt out.

Tho’ my errors and wrecks lie about me.

And I am not a demigod,

I cannot make it cohere.

— Canto CXVI

That I lost my center

Fighting the world.

The dreams clash

And are shattered …

Let the Gods forgive what I

Have made

Notes for Canto CXVII et seq.

Whether the Gods forgave Pound cannot be known. As for mortals of his generation and those since inclined to pardon, they have needed to absolve him for some company he kept, both in person and sustained correspondence. The British Union of Fascists and Father Charles Coughlin numbered among Pound’s favorites. Pound’s adulation of Mussolini has required shrewd counsel to secure acquittal, to say nothing of his approval of Hitler as statesman.

Luckily for Pound, an exculpatory industry did develop, seeded when Cornell’s successful insanity plea spared him a treason trial. One protector of the Pound canon, William Cookson, argued that Pound’s embracing the Axis was not wholly outlandish, as the belligerents of World War II were roughly equivalent: “Neither side … was innocent of ‘crimes against humanity’ … measured by standards of impartial justice, Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman and Stalin were guilty of criminal actions as well as Hitler.” Lest the advantage be lost to Pound, Cookson added a note on gradations of reprehensibility: “Mussolini and the Italians were probably the least guilty.” In the final analysis, Cookson predicted hopefully, “When Pound’s errors have been forgotten, the humanity and inclusiveness of his concerns will be remembered.” Another guardian, Professor Wendy Flory, assured readers by elaborating on this point of comparison: Pound never exercised responsibility equal to Eichmann’s. Flory exonerated the poet, who “did nothing that led either directly or indirectly to the taking of any action against Jews whatsoever.”

To follow Cookson is to enter a landscape without moral texture, where the diversity of wartime actions collapsed into undifferentiated criminality. Undeniably, the leadership of Churchill, FDR, and Truman had faults. But these men were not classifiable with the twin grotesques, Hitler and Stalin, as was obvious to anyone save a Pound militant. As to the remembering of Pound’s “humanity and inclusiveness,” Cookson’s point was polemical and properly contested. Nobel laureate Saul Bellow excused nothing: “Pound advocated in his poems and in his broadcasts enmity to the Jews and preached hatred and murder.” Nor did literary scholar Christopher Ricks equivocate, calling Pound’s anti-Semitism a “political and spiritual monstrosity.”

If we take Flory’s contention to its logical end, words in print or broadcast do not matter. By extension, then, the postwar Nuremberg inquest wrongly charged the Nazi publicist Julius Streicher for peddling ideas in Der Stürmer permissive of mass homicide. Worth noting, too, Streicher by virtue of his anti-Semitic (and pornographic) mania deserved comparison to Pound more than the computing functionary, Eichmann. Plainly, the scale of Streicher’s anti-Jewish incitement exceeded Pound’s. But qualitative differences between what the two men said were less striking. Pound was complicit.

As political oracle, self-deception defeated Pound, who considered himself by birthright and his probes of economic history to be a potential “brain-truster” for American statesmen. In fact, they requited only a tiny fraction of the attention he lavished on them. Confident of his fitness for public duty, he also fancied for himself a diplomatic role. When relations between Tokyo and Washington reached a nadir in 1941, he suggested this swap as ameliorative measure: In exchange for “color and sound films of the best 300 Noh dramas,” the Americans would transfer the garrison island of Guam to Japan. In 1945, Pound suggested to Washington officials that they commission him to meet with Tokyo’s embassy at Salò to negotiate peace terms between Japan and the United States. Delusions of indispensability also conditioned Pound’s loyalty to Mussolini, which stretched decades past 1945: The Duce was not only the savior of Europe, custodian of its multilayered cultural inheritance, and protector of the arts, but he also perceived in Pound a partner in these missions. Except for the 1933 audience, though, which flattered Pound’s amour propre, Mussolini did not seek or speak with him but perfunctorily acknowledged receipt of his advice. 

Even Radio Rome authorities needed convincing in advance that Pound, warily viewed as an unpredictable eccentric, rated their sponsorship. That preferment never came his way frustrated Pound, in the U.S. instance confirmatory of “democracies electing their sewage” and letting the “dung flow” sweep away the patriotic and good. Late in life, he confessed cautiously and cryptically to yet another disappointment, namely, misreading the main questions of his era: “I was out of focus, taking a symptom for a cause.” This admission, needless to elaborate, hardly amounted to a mea culpa or disavowal of Fascism. Pound differed not at all from countless people who mistook Mussolini (and Hitler) for the world’s headway. Primo Levi once offered this explanation, its emphasis on the political leader as artist, an idea to which Pound had proved irresistibly drawn:

Everybody must know, or remember, that when Hitler and Mussolini spoke in public, they were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods. They were “charismatic leaders”; they possessed a secret power of seduction that did not proceed from the creditability or the soundness of the things they said but from the suggestive way in which they said them, from their eloquence, from their histrionic art, perhaps instinctive, perhaps patiently learned and practiced. The ideas they proclaimed were not always the same and were, in general, aberrant or silly or cruel. And yet they were acclaimed with hosannas and followed to the death by millions of the faithful.

Excerpted from Seekers and Partisans: Americans Abroad in the Crisis Years, 1935–1941 by David Mayers. Copyright © 2026 David Mayers. Excerpted with permission of Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved.

Buy This Book

The 16 letters-to-the-editor that Schomburg published in the New York Times between 1901 and 1905 provide a revealing window on the transformation that took place both for Schomburg and for Nueva York after the end of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. Since so many of the organizers of the Cuban and Puerto Rican independence movement moved back to Cuba or had died in the war, Nueva York underwent a major transformation almost overnight. As Helton and Zafar have noted, “After 1898 … Schomburg lost his political community, and like many other Afro-Cubans and Afro-Puerto Ricans frustrated by a stalled revolutionary project, he had to reinvent himself ” while “watching racial injustices unfold simultaneously in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the United States.” It was during that period that Schomburg offered his perspective to the New York Times on a range of topics related to his antiracist agenda, including U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico, lynching, and disenfranchisement of Black voters in the United States.

In the pages of the New York Times, Schomburg positions himself as a voice of reason and a moral compass, calling on the United States to live up to its democratic ideals. At times, he states his position from the perspective of a Puerto Rican observing the aftermath of 1898 on the island. In a letter entitled “Questions by a Porto Rican,” published on August 9, 1902, Schomburg addresses the U.S. Immigration Bureau policy of “prohibiting the coming to the United States of residents and natives of Porto Rico and the Philippines, except after passing the same examination as is enforced against other alien immigrants” who are not from territories of the United States. His letter points out the unspoken prejudice behind such policies: “Does the citizen naturalized in Porto Rico and the citizen naturalized in Ohio differ in any degree of excellence? They are American citizens, and as such entitled to the privileges and immunities enjoyed by all citizens of the United States.” In this period preceding the 1917 Jones-Shafroth Act, which granted statutory U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, Schomburg calls attention to the second-class status afforded to “the Territories.” It was also a period when the New York Times and many other leading Anglophone dailies “promoted themes of underdevelopment, inferiority, and spectacle” in coverage of the new U.S. territories even as so-called journalistic objectivity became the guiding principle of the news industry. Schomburg repeatedly calls out such moments of racism and hypocrisy in his letters to the New York Times, as he addresses a range of contemporary issues, in measured and direct prose.

Several of his letters address lynching, as in his June 28, 1903, letter, “Lynching a Savage Relic,” in which he observes, “The letter on ‘The Law’s Delay,’ published by you on June 24, seems to have been written while the mind was under some heavy emotional impulses.” Schomburg takes issue with “the statement that the mob who lynched and burned a negro murderer at Wilmington, Del., was ‘composed of average American citizens, of men very much like us.’” Positioning himself on rational and moral higher ground, Schomburg argues,

There is a feeling among Christian people when an outcast has committed a horrible murder that the majesty of the law ought to be allowed to punish him with the severest penalty. This is preferable to having “men like the rest of us” take the law in their hands, usurp established justice, and create in its place the partial administration of justice and punishment of culprits to the satisfaction of mob rule.

He exposes this effort to disguise the horror and irrationality of mob rule as the will of “average American citizens.” He makes visible the hypocrisy and immorality of such a claim: “Those who took part in the Wilmington (Del.) lynching ‘constitute a representative American community,’ says the letter, but the moral reasoning is weak: for what is the use of fixed principles of right and wrong if they are to be treated as mere abstractions and not as the practical guide of conduct?” As Schomburg’s question asks readers to consider the immorality of mob rule, it also invites consideration of the unspoken racial lines drawn by the claim of its link to “a representative American community.”

Another powerful intervention appears in Schomburg’s December 20, 1903, letter, “Union League Club’s Actions,” in which he points out the systemic racism experienced by Black communities of the U.S. South: “The Constitutions of various Southern States are not only in open opposition to the United States Constitution, but actually in contravention of the very Declaration of Independence,” enabling “notorious practices by which those States are depriving the negroes from the lawful exercise of their political and natural rights.” By asserting that these state constitutions defy the founding principles of the United States, Schomburg invites his readers to recognize their deeply cynical practices of voter disenfranchisement: “Who will deny that the various qualifications or clauses were not carefully drawn up by the offending States as traps to positively deprive the majority of negroes from the exercise of their political rights?” As Schomburg’s letters identify and ask readers to recognize instances of racism in the United States and its territories, they also reveal something of his view of the possibilities of print at this transitional stage in his career.

In his letter from October 18, 1903, “Tillman Trial and Verdict,” Schomburg lauds as “just and fair criticism of how things can be done without impunity and without danger in South Carolina” a Times editorial that denounced the acquittal of South Carolina Lieutenant Governor James Tillman in his trial for the murder of newspaper editor Narciso Gener Gonsales. Tillman fatally shot Gonsales for what he saw as irreparable harm to his reputation caused by Gonsales’ newspaper, and he argued successfully in court that the murder was an act of self-defense. This trial, which pitted Tillman’s sense of Southern honor against Gonsales’s right to press freedom, inspires Schomburg to articulate his own view of the press:

The press is like the safety valve of a boiler—always ready to blow through printed papers the abuses or unlawful acts done against the welfare, peace, and prosperity of the community. It checks the spirit of anarchy and tyranny, and like the bugle call, is ready to reverberate the sound of danger and bring to the defense of the State the good citizens to remove the oppressor and re-establish the proper conditions of order.

Schomburg’s words describe the role that his own editorials play in the Times — as well as a view of the newspaper that reaches back to 19th-century Nueva York. By releasing and exposing the hot air of unlawful abuse and corruption through the solid material of print on paper, the press diffuses tensions and protects communities. When necessary, it also sounds the alarm, calling the community to action to fight off oppression. It is a vision of the press that Schomburg acknowledges in his letter “seems to be in peril of death in the State of South Carolina.”

Schomburg’s run of letters to the editor written to the New York Times ends around 1905, and his subsequent writing appeared primarily in the Black press — suggesting another change in his approach by the 1910s. His article “General Evaristo Estenoz” for the July 1912 issue of The Crisis exhibits such a shift, while demonstrating how Schomburg carried on the legacy of 19th-century Nueva York. Scholar Vanessa Valdés has categorized Schomburg’s essays from this period as crónicas, arguing that Schomburg made use of the genre because it “afforded a discursive space for the introduction of Spanish-speaking men of African descent in periodicals written and read by an Anglophone African diasporic audience.”

Schomburg’s “General Evaristo Estenoz” starts with a news item: “The cable has flashed over the world the news that in Cuba General Evaristo Estenoz has taken up the gage of battle for the rights of his dark fellowmen, and that a crisis in Cuba is the result.” In addition, like Martí, who wrote many of his crónicas about the United States for an audience in Latin America, Schomburg needed to explain this news item to an audience — in this case Anglophone African American readers — that was likely unfamiliar with the news and its context. He references his late friend Serra, explaining that “soon after the close of the Cuban War and the establishment of the republic, he [Evaristo Estenoz] associated himself with Rafael Serra, the lamented Negro philosopher.” Serra and Estenoz, Schomburg explains, became the architects of a new Independent Colored Party in Cuba, “its object being to promote the interests of the colored race, to urge the government to recognize their rights as citizens and taxpayers, and to accord them a fair proportion of the elective and appointive offices.” As in his letters to the New York Times, Schomburg makes a rationally and morally grounded case for equality and justice, noting Serra’s book For Whites and Blacks, which argues that “since both races had fought to make the republic possible, they should enjoy in common the burdens and the benefits of the country,” is a founding text of the Independent Colored Party (ICP). The essay also references the ICP’s newspaper, Previsión (Foresight), edited by Estenoz, as an indication of the party’s widespread popularity — and also perhaps a demonstration of the ideal role of the newspaper that Schomburg shared in the New York Times: “So great was the demand for this publication that the press could not turn out enough copies to supply the thousands of readers.” The healthy demand for the party’s newspaper serves as evidence of its democratic success. The essay explains that the recent turmoil in Cuba is a result of the suppression of this party and its movement.

The remainder of the essay describes the organized and violent repression of the ICP: “The Negroes began to realize, when their leaders were thrown into prison on the eve of election, that the white Cubans had determined that they should not have any representation save what was bestowed on them as a charity.” We see here the themes of injustice and hypocrisy that also appeared in the New York Times letters:

Many Cuban Negroes curse the dawn of the Republic. Negroes were welcomed in the time of oppression, in the time of hardship, during the days of the revolution, but in the days of peace and of white immigration they are deprived of positions, ostracized and made political outcasts. The Negro has done much for Cuba; Cuba has done nothing for the Negro.

This is a heart-wrenching observation coming from someone who experienced the hope and energy of 19th-century Nueva York firsthand. Far from realizing the dream of racial equality in a democratic republic, Afro-Cubans and Afro-Puerto Ricans view the new nation as a curse and an oppressive and extractive force: “The black men of Cuba have taken to the woods because conditions are intolerable, because, as my friend, the late Jose Marti, the apostle of Cuban freedom, said: ‘So long as there remains one injustice to repair in Cuba the revolutionary redemption has not finished its work.’” Only in his concluding lines, in calling Martí a friend, does he choose to divulge something of his proximity to the situation in Cuba. He does so in the context of acknowledging that the work of Nueva York—namely, the dream of a democratic Cuban republic — is an unfinished project. This reference to work in progress might be the essay’s tightest link to the crónica genre. “General Evaristo Estenoz” participates in the crónica genre for its optimistic attempt to write a better world into existence, no matter how terrible the odds might seem. Schomburg himself suggests something of this optimism in another New York Times letter, in which he reflects on the racism faced by Black Americans: “I believe that if we were to try to better things, try to be a little more optimistic in our views, these matters can be remedied: we may succeed in time in partly overcoming the existing conditions without sacrificing genuine affections for doubtful ones.” This radical hope might be considered one of the legacies of 19th-century Nueva York that Schomburg carried into both his writing and his work as a researcher and collector of archival materials relevant to Black history and culture.

Schomburg seeks to put the past in conversation with the present. He does so by taking on a much broader swath of the archival record. As scholar César Salgado has argued, Schomburg’s collecting was ambitious both for its geographic and historical reach, as he set out to create “an archive that could redefine the Renaissance as the Afro-Latin cultural outcome of Southern European and North-and-Central African socioeconomic and migratory exchange and integration at the very moment of transatlantic expansion.” For Schomburg, recovering this history is necessary not simply to set the record straight, but also to blaze a path forward for achieving a more just world.

From that perspective, we might reconsider one of Schomburg’s most widely read texts, “The Negro Digs Up His Past,” published in the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic and reprinted that same year in The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke. The text, which might also be associated with the crónica genre, is a call to action, a manifesto, a declaration of a new possibility unfolding:

History must restore what slavery took away, for it is the social damage of slavery that the present generations must repair and offset. So among the rising democratic millions we find the Negro thinking more collectively, more retrospectively than the rest, and apt out of the very pressure of the present to become the most enthusiastic antiquarian of them all.

Schomburg’s words recall Martí’s tendency to write about possibilities unfolding: “Democratic millions” are rising and “thinking more collectively” as they look toward the past to address the challenges of the present. Schomburg also emphasizes the significance of the collective in his archival findings: “But weightier surely than any evidence of individual talent and scholarship could ever be, is the evidence of important collaboration and significant pioneer initiative in social service and reform, in the efforts toward race emancipation, colonization and race betterment.” His words emphasize the significance of collaboration to advance racial justice that has happened in the past, and he points out that this is an ongoing project that must be undertaken so that “the full story of human collaboration and interdependence may be told and realized.” He suggests that he is not looking for individual heroes of history, but rather the webs of organizing — networks, we might say, like that of 19th-century Nueva York. Given his experience in that very community, Schomburg would have known what to look for, and he also knew how to model such collaboration in his own work.

Excerpted from Printing Nueva York: Spanish-Language Print Culture, Media Change, and Democracy in the Late Nineteenth Century by Kelley Kreitz. Copyright © 2026 New York University. Excerpted with permission of New York University Press. All rights reserved.

Buy This Book

The exhibit was due to run until the beginning of February 1973. It was closed early, before Nixon’s second inauguration on January 20, 1973. Mayo explained: 

That, of course, was the election where the Committee to Reelect the President was doing all of its nefarious deeds [for example, the Watergate break-ins] … The people from CREEP [Committee to Re-Elect the President] bodily migrated into the inaugural committee. When they came to sort of “case the place” for the inaugural ball and inaugural festivities, which they had had a tradition of holding at the [National Museum of American History], and the Air and Space Museum, and the Kennedy Center, . . . and saw this “Right to Vote” show they just about freaked out, and went to the assistant director, and said that this show was too controversial for good Republicans to see, and they closed it during the inaugural week, and it remained closed until the end of January when it came down … They physically closed the exhibition. I was called into the assistant director’s office and told if I went to the Washington Post I would lose my job … They [members of Nixon’s inaugural committee] were appalled by sights of women picketing in front of the White House, and Blacks on the march at Selma, and Indians voting!  … If it hadn’t been so personally frustrating and traumatic for me it would have been a hoot . . . , but at the time it was pretty scary … Even my conservative colleagues thought it was a bit much to close the show … It was exactly like being on [Nixon’s] Enemies List. I felt I’d really arrived.

Mayo understood the negative reaction to the exhibit as an indication that the content hit home by challenging traditional conservative conceptions of whose history mattered. Conservative Republicans in the ascendant “New Right” took American history seriously, as both a reflection and a shaper of American culture. This example of their censure of the new social and political histories of women and people of color attests to how these histories undercut the ability of the Right to appeal to American voters through uncritical renderings of the nation’s past. Prior to the 1960s, traditional history narratives, including those featured in museums, were replete with American exceptionalism and focused on white male founders, leaders, and mavericks. They typically ignored America’s diversity, paradoxes and inequalities and the conflicts that featured prominently in much of the cutting-edge scholarship by the 1970s. To recenter history on women and marginalized racial, ethnic, sexual, and economic groups was, as Mayo perceived, a challenge to the powerful white men who had dominated the nation and its history since its founding. Mayo found her work at the Smithsonian to be in the political crosshairs of an increasingly polarized public discourse on American history and identity.

Mayo became a museum professional in the wake of the civil rights movement and at the height of the women’s liberation movement. She was eager to design historical exhibits featuring the contributions of women and people of color to American political history. But as a federal employee in the nation’s premier museum, she faced censure by political operatives opposed to presenting knowledge as it was being recast by women and minorities. Mayo claimed that she felt she had “really arrived,” when the Nixon inaugural committee targeted the content of her show. She knew she had created a political impact strong enough to provoke opposition; her work incorporating women and people of color mattered. Indeed, this episode foreshadowed history’s place in the culture wars of the late 20th century. Over the next two decades, Reagan Republicans of the New Right would make controlling or taking back the dominant historical narrative, defunding education, and starving agencies that supported social science research a key part of their political and cultural agenda. For them, the social, progressive, and radical history produced over the course of the 20th century was biased, too critical of America, too divisive, and unpatriotic. They moved to defund and dissolve the National Endowment for the Humanities and to defund the National Archives. They persistently attacked American educators in schools, colleges, and universities and attempted to restrict public access to the National Archives. These efforts continue to this day.

Heather Huyck also began work in public history in the early 1970s, She originally took a job as a seasonal park worker for the National Park Service in 1971, and by 1980 she was a content specialist in women’s history in the NPS — the only person in that position. A course at Carleton College had awakened her interest in women’s history. Then, as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, she had been a field-worker on the Women’s History Sources Survey, the project that generated the reference work promoted by the Organization of American Historians’ Committee on the Status of Women and managed by Clarke Chambers and Andrea Hinding.

Huyck had a special fondness for historic landmarks and parks, having visited many in her childhood, which is why she chose to work in public history. While at the NPS, she developed an understanding of how to make women’s history a part of the nation’s public history. Beginning in the late 1970s, Huyck participated in public history sessions, workshops, and conferences at OAH meetings and at the Southwest Institute for Research on Women in Tucson. She trained public historians as interpreters at the NPS training center in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. In 1981, the NPS sent her to Seneca Falls, New York, the site credited as the birthplace of the American women’s rights movement, to consult on the early planning and development of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park.

The concept for the park had originated with local history groups, including the Seneca Falls Consortium and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation, and with scholars active in the Upstate New York Women’s History Organization (UNYWHO) in 1979. These groups lobbied Congress to establish the park in Seneca Falls.

Congress approved the legislation for the site in December 1980 but by 1982 still had not appropriated funds to build it or its programs. UNYWHO and the Seneca Falls Consortium mounted an intense lobbying campaign in support of adequate congressional appropriations for the park. In their efforts to raise money to purchase and renovate the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House and the Wesleyan Chapel, where the famous Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions had been read in 1848, the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation attracted a star-studded cast to its Honorary Trustees Board. These included star of the M*A*S*H TV series Alan Alda, feminist artist Judy Chicago, feminist activists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, presidential advisor Linda Johnson Robb, anthropologist Ashley Montague, and feminist theorist Adrienne Rich.

The new National Park Service superintendent warned that unless the Seneca Falls project could draw national attention to the prospective park, it would go the way of other federal programs for women, “archival oblivion.” In 1982, UNYWHO and the Seneca Falls Consortium mounted a major conference and festival in the village of Seneca Falls to give shape to the plans. Alan Alda attended the opening ceremony, bringing added national media attention to the event. The response from every corner of the women’s history movement was overwhelmingly positive.

A central figure in the initiatives for the Seneca Falls park was Judith Wellman, who from 1981 to 1983 served as the chair of the OAH Committee on the Status of Women. She was also a founder of UNYWHO. Her institutional connections helped her garner support from other academic women’s historians for this event. She’d been appointed to the OAH-CSW by Gerda Lerner, who along with Anne Firor Scott and Joan Hoff-Wilson were at the conference and collectively represented the OAH as current or former officers of that association. Heather Huyck represented the National Park Service; Patricia Miller King attended as director of the Schlesinger Library. Assistance was rendered from afar by the AHA’s Noralee Frankel and the Smithsonian Institution’s Anita Rapone and Edith Mayo. Betty Morgan of National Women’s History Week and Bettye Collier-Thomas of the Bethune Museum and the National Archives for Black Women’s History also participated. A dozen more leading scholars attended. Thus, this major public history initiative had the support of many individual scholars as well as more formal history institutions.

The Elizabeth Cady Stanton Foundation claimed success when on July 19, 1983, the 135th anniversary of the reading of the Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions, Congress appropriated a half-million dollars for the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. New York senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alfonse D’Amato drafted the appropriations bill. The Women’s Rights National Historical Park is still in operation to this day. Eventually both the Stanton House and site of the Wesleyan Chapel were purchased, restored, and put into operation as public history sites by the National Park Service. The NPS also acquired the Mary Anne M’Clintock House and the Hunt House in nearby Waterloo, New York, where two of the fomenters of the 1848 convention lived and planned their historic deeds.

Public historians and regional women’s history groups, like UNYWHO, an affiliate of the national Conference Group on Women’s History, reached beyond the ivory tower and national historical associations. By the early 1980s, these groups were bringing programs to schoolchildren, as with Minnesota’s Teaching Women’s History Center, and to the public, as with the Women’s Rights National Historical Park of the National Park Service. Scholars who was active across multiple professional associations, advanced women’s history in both the public and academic spheres. Academic work had public applications, and regional work had national ramifications. For Heather Huyck, who saw women’s history as a transformative and consciousness-raising force, the Women’s Rights National Historical Park was an exemplary outcome, reflecting her broader vision.

I was trying both to get park units to understand they had women’s history and to get more park units focused on women’s history. . . . We had a joke for a long time that there was one site where there was no women’s history. We thought it was Alcatraz, but then we found out that the wardens’ families lived there and the prisoners’ families visited. . . . So we always talked about the “Alcatraz principle” — that the only question is, “How hard do you want to look [for women] and how do you interpret it?,” not, “Were there women?”

Huyck’s consultation on Seneca Falls, which she saw as a “landmark theme study in women’s history,” was part of her larger intellectual project of integrating women into the interpretation of America’s historic places everywhere. She knew that women had a presence in all national monuments and parks. In 2001 she remarked,

The park system is now 383 units … everything from Constitution Gardens in DC to Yellowstone to Alcatraz … There’s women’s history all over the place. . . . The basic understanding I’ve always had was you had this national system of delivery, to put it into marketing terms. You have a built-in audience. We get [millions of] visitors a year, and you have quality [resources]. A more recent director of the Park Service said it was a huge campus, but what I’ve seen is it was an amazing set of resources and delivery to willing audiences “of who we are and where we came from.” If there’s a piece that’s core to me it’s that. Then the piece that’s right there in terms of my own background in women’s history is to tell the “whole story” at each and every one of these sites. So more recently I did a piece on women and the Civil War, and I said those battlefields were people’s farmyards. All the horrific stories of your dining room being taken over for surgery and the stories of the women who hid out in the caves of Vicksburg … and it’s a … civil war. It’s a domestic war and what does that mean? So, I’m much more conscious now of being able to say by using a feminist approach, by looking at the whole story and the women’s history, you get a totally different interpretation of what happened.

Huyck’s insight was that women’s history, when presented through the National Park Service, could reach millions of Americans who had scarce opportunity to study in a university. The tens of millions of park visitors each year represented an audience who would find in the parks an integrated view of women in history. This meant introducing women’s stories into existing sites as well as creating sites dedicated solely to women. Women’s historians — even as they struggled for legitimacy within academia — were keenly aware of the need to introduce their grand epistemological project to the broader public.

Excerpted from Reclaiming Clio: Making American Women's History, 1900-2000 by Jennifer Banning Tomás. Copyright © 2025 Jennifer Banning Tomás. Excerpted with permission of University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved. 

Buy This Book

By the fall of 1834, news of the Lane Controversy had enveloped the world of higher learning. College presidents were adamant about stifling abolitionist dissent and preventing similar student revolts in their own institutions. A meeting of college and seminary officials unanimously agreed that “the times imperiously demanded that all antislavery agitation should be suppressed by laws” similar to those proposed at Lane. College officials resolved to make anti-­abolition formal institutional policy. They believed that student abolition was too controversial and would ostracize students from the South who provided key finances to their institutions, evidence of slavery’s connections to northern colleges. Student abolitionism was also antithetical to colonization and contradicted faculty’s outlook on the future of the United States as a white country. 

Amherst College student abolitionists recognized the potential threat faculty power posed to their activities. In August 1834, they voted unanimously to affirm the principles of their antislavery society. The timing of the vote suggests they were aware of the stirring backlash of suppression. Yet, they remained steadfast in their convictions. Students also continued their subscriptions to movement publications and listened to a peer’s testimony detailing a recent trip to the South, where he witnessed the oppression of enslaved people. The students continued their activities despite growing opposition to student abolitionism.

By the fall of 1834, Amherst student abolitionists were directly under siege. The colonizationist college president Heman Humphrey and other faculty demanded that the student society disband. Humphrey’s sanction precipitated a fascinating exchange between students and faculty that illuminates the ways in which abolition challenged power relations in the academy. The Amherst controversy unfolded in parallel to the Lane rebellion, and student abolitionist organs at Andover Theological Seminary and Hamilton College dissolved around this time as well. In October, the students unanimously rejected Humphrey’s suggestion to cease their work. Student leaders, including Leander Thompson, authored a rebuke to Humphrey. Their declaration affirmed abolition as a moral, religious, and political movement. The students could not overlook the cause of the enslaved. “We look again over two millions of our Countrymen —­ we hear the clanking of their chains. We listen to their moving pleas for deliverance,” the students wrote. They believed it was their duty to follow the golden rule. Disbanding their organ, they believed, would violate their moral obligations and vocation. The students’ organization had also grown to upwards of 70 members. Signifying their evangelical abolitionism, they argued that slaveholders were guilty of the sin of enslaving people “whose birth-right is liberty and who possess immortal minds created to be free.” Abolition must come; “Fiat Justitia, ruat Coelum” (Let justice be done though the heavens fall). They resolved to continue campaigning for Black freedom.

Student abolitionism was representative of the movement’s broader impact on society. Abolition challenged the political economy of slavery as well as organized colonization. Student abolition was a direct challenge to college colonizationists. At Andover, faculty actively buoyed anti-­abolitionist sentiment. This mirrored the broader reactionary backlash against abolition across the country, exemplified in the proliferation of anti-­abolition mob violence in northern cities and towns, the suppression of abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets in the South, and the advent of the “gag rule” in Congress.

The censure of student abolitionism demonstrated the reach and influence of the slave power in northern institutions. Slaveholders and their sympathizers had a grip on colleges and attempted to dictate the parameters of study and debate on campus. The opposition of most faculty to abolition was a formidable obstacle to the movement and particularly for student abolitionists. Such dynamics —­ the institutional power of administrators and faculty beholden to capital and the ideologies tethered to it, on the one hand, and insurgent dissenting movements for a new humanity among students and some faculty on the other —­ resonate across the history of the university and continue in our own time.

The controversy over abolition at colleges and seminaries was deftly represented in an editorial exchange in May 1834 between James Hall and Theodore Weld. Hall was the editor of the Western Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal. A former judge and politician from Illinois, Hall moved to Cincinnati in the 1830s and chided student involvement in abolition. He believed that no seminary or college should foster such sentiments. He wrote, “There certainly ought to be some spot hallowed from the contests of party, sacredly protected from the contamination of the malignant passions, where the mind might be imbued with the lessons of truth, and peace, and honor, unalloyed with prejudice. Such sanctuaries should all our seminaries of learning be.” Hall singled out the student abolitionists at Lane for their actions when conventional wisdom had ruled abolition absurd. “The calm wisdom of the nation has long since settled down in the opinion that this subject should be left to the providence of God,” he claimed, and not to the proclivities of “boys at school wearing paper caps, flourishing wooden swords.” Hall mocked students for their dedication to Black freedom and dismissed them as youthful idealists. He went on to explain his version of the function of colleges and the purpose of higher learning.

Hall’s objective was to shield colleges from the abolition movement. According to Hall, “Colleges are public property: they are intended for the general good, and are parts of a great system of beneficent institutions, the objects of which are the education of the youth, the dissemination of useful knowledge, and the creation of a pure and elevated public sentiment.” Colleges served the public good, he claimed, and “must possess the public confidence.” To maximize the purpose and usefulness of them, he claimed, colleges must appeal to the widest audiences for patronage. But when a college assumes a partisan character, according to Hall, “its sphere of operation will be limited, and its usefulness diminished.” An institution that served a specific political interest diminished its influence in society, he believed. Hall explicitly argued that students’ public support for abolition was “at variance with those of a great body of people in some of the states” and as a result their “charity becomes limited.” In other words, a college or seminary that fostered abolition “deprive[s] the institution of the confidence of parents in the slaveholding states.” 

Hall’s position was clear. Abolition obstructed college revenue streams from slaveholding patronage. His editorial neglected to mention the politicized nature of slavery and its ideological grasp on colleges, an inherently political position that contradicted his own argument for college neutrality. Acknowledging such contradictions assumed Black humanity. Hall could not accept such terms. The contradictions in his argument mounted, as he went on to praise the ACS as “one of the noblest devices of Christian benevolence and enlightened patriotism” worthy of public patronage. Hall overlooked these explicitly political assertions because the political economy of slavery underpinned society and its institutions, and the ACS was seen as the only respectable solution to slavery. For Hall and many other whites, the ACS’ conservative outlook made it the only reputable organization, as it touted opposition to slavery while aligning with their racist ideology. And yet Hall continued, “No good can be gained” from political discussions “by students, or by the establishment of political clubs in colleges.”

For Hall, the question of slavery was simply too serious for students to consider. “Surely a topic of such grave magnitude … connected with the whole scheme of civil subordination is not one to be made the theme of sophomoric declamation.” According to Hall, the possibility of colleges and seminaries becoming sites of political debate over topics like slavery was “preposterous.” Such institutions should be “kept pure from the contamination of irritating topics, and the influence of peculiar doctrines in politics.” In Hall’s view, colleges should simply continue operating as they had been, receiving money from slaveholders, and students and faculty should continue supporting the ACS. Any kind of political challenge to these systems was not to be tolerated at colleges. 

Hall perceived student involvement in abolition as a political conspiracy. “Are the sympathies of these young gentlemen to be worked upon in reference to the abstract question of slavery, while a cunning agent is enlisting their prejudices, and preparing them to divulge the doctrines of party?” Hall believed that abolitionists were indoctrinating “embryo clergymen” to spread abolition across the country. This was a “cunningly devised scheme,” Hall quipped, but he assured his readers that “the indignation of the public will put it down, and the united voice of all moderate and reflecting men … will be raised to admonish these gentlemen, to mind their own business, and their books.” Hall condemned the introduction into colleges of abolition or any controversial topic because he believed it was antithetical to the purpose of college education and would be disruptive to society. 

Hall’s meditation on the proper political role of colleges in society reveals his belief in their significance in shaping political and social issues. Hall’s position aligned with that of many college officials as they contended with the radical challenge of student abolition.

Weld countered Hall’s criticism of student abolition. Rebuking Hall’s derisive characterization of students, Weld showed that the vast majority of Lane students were in their twenties and some in their early thirties. “Thirty of the theological class are over twenty-­six years old, fourteen over twenty-­eight, and nine are between thirty and thirty five,” Weld wrote. He retorted, “So much for the babyhood of theological students.” Far from a result of uninformed, passionate impulse, the abolitionist sentiment of the Lane students was based on their study of various arguments related to slavery, abolition, and colonization, and they drew their own conclusions. He outlined the proceedings of the Lane Debates and emphasized that rather than sowing seeds of discord, “harmony and brotherly love prevailed not only during the debate, but still remains unbroken.” Weld was writing in May of 1834, before the controversy with the faculty ensued. To that point, according to Weld, five students had left the seminary, but their withdrawals had nothing to do with the rise of abolition among students. In fact, 18 students had enrolled or expressed interest in joining the seminary after the debates. Rather than fomenting chaos among students, as the detractors claimed, abolition increased enrollment at the seminary.

And yet, Weld lamented, Hall called for silence on such a divisive issue. “What! Are our theological seminaries to be awed into silence upon great questions of human duty?” he asked, and continued, “Are they to be bribed over to the interests of an unholy public sentiment, by promises of patronage, or by threats of its withdrawal?” Weld condemned colleges’ monied interests with the slave power. Should students be “tutored into passivity,” or should all topics of discussion be banned “except upon the popular side?” he asked. Are students to avoid all issues that “involve human interests” in order to pacify popular sentiment? Weld was making an argument for an activist education regardless of public perception or financial ties. Indeed, the state of public opinion on slavery was all the more cause for students to discuss slavery. Those “who preach in the nineteenth century must know the nineteenth century,” he asserted. Students were obligated to discuss political and social questions facing the society in which they lived. He focused on Hall’s hypocrisy and argued that all sorts of political questions had been discussed in colleges. “Colonization discussions have been held, and colonization societies have long existed in almost all our institutions of learning,” and there was no public outcry among whites against it. Temperance, moral societies, antigambling and antidueling societies “have been rife for years in our institutions of learning,” Weld wrote. The only difference with the ascendance of abolition in these places was that many whites, especially white benefactors, objected to its principles. “So long as discussions upon the subject of slavery conduced to results in accordance with your views, your horizon, it would seem, was unclouded with portents of ominous boding.” 

As long as students supported Hall’s politics, Weld observed, he had no issue with political organizations at colleges. “But recent discussions have produced convictions about slavery, which disown affinity with yours,” Weld charged, “and have led to the adoption of measures at war with your views of expediency and now forsooth disaster and downfall assail the cause of education.” Weld laid bare the contradictions in Hall’s essay and skewered his arguments, which benefited the slavocracy and the politics of racism exemplified in established social relations. He also condemned Hall’s position regarding public sentiment reacting to forestall abolition. That type of rhetoric led to anti-­abolition mob violence. Weld recognized it as such, writing “This is precisely the inflammatory language, word for word, which was used by certain demagogue prints in the city of New York last October.” Weld had put his finger on the suppressionist actions of mob violence as violations of free discussion and abolitionist dissent. “Has it come to this? Is free inquiry to be paralyzed by the terror of pains and penalties?” When it came to discussing Black freedom, the vaunted rights of the Constitution and the law of the land could be denied with impunity by the power of white mobs.

The exchange revealed the stakes of abolition at institutions of higher learning. Hall’s arguments represented the type of college education that was firmly entrenched at Eurocentric American colleges and seminaries. It was an education for the so-­called common good, buttressed by white-­supremacist ideology, and in practice was exemplified by college colonizationists: remove free Black people from the country while sustaining financial ties to slaveholding patronage in northern institutions. In contrast, Weld articulated an activist education that facilitated study in social and political issues and fostered student agitation for Black freedom. His view of advanced education was to allow any and all discussion on political topics and let students decide for themselves their own positions, not to be dictated by donors and public sentiment.

Hall’s objective, Weld summarized, had been to “muzzle discussion upon the subject of slavery, especially in institutions of learning.” But Hall’s efforts were for naught. As Weld explained to Hall, “You are too late, sir. Discussion has begun.” Indeed, discussion had begun, and students were leading the charge for abolition at colleges from Maine to Ohio.

Excerpted from Dissenting Forces: A History of Abolition and Black Thought in Higher Learning by Michael E. Jirik. Copyright © 2025 New York University. Excerpted with permission of New York University Press. All rights reserved. 

Buy This Book

No one’s image exemplified the post-Revolutionary anti-aristocratic ethos more intensely and intentionally than that crafted by Andrew Jackson, the first president from the western territories and the only general to be elected president since George Washington. Supported by the votes of men enfranchised since the Revolution, Jackson was fiercely loyal, demanded loyalty from others, and exacted retribution without hesitation. He seemed to have two personas, one forceful, raging, and deadly; the other affectionate, polished, and charming. His dual identities encompassed military leadership and being a skilled lawyer and land speculator who often quoted the Bible.

Jackson was born in 1767 and raised by his widowed mother until her death when he was fourteen. He lost his brothers during the Revolutionary War and received a head wound as a boy from a British officer in punishment for defiance. This background enabled Jackson and his supporters to credibly construct his childhood as harsh. In reality, however, his mother’s family was prosperous, and he grew up in an affluent uncle’s home. He attended a private academy and taught for a while, receiving enough schooling plus legal training under the guidance of influential lawyers to practice law by 1787. At fifteen he even inherited about £400, approximately $85,400 in 2024, which he quickly squandered. Invaluable connections among the small group of professionals in the territory that became Tennessee made for highly profitable land dealings, including in regions of questionable legal status, plus a successful entry into politics in his early twenties. Despite so many advantages — unusual in western regions — he and his advocates later highlighted the tragic elements and ignored the blessings. They narrated Jackson as a self-made and self-fashioned frontier hero, which attests to the growing force of that mythology and the corresponding weakening of narratives about community support. 

Jackson built his reputation for resolute discipline and relentless patriotism by leading volunteer troops effectively against indigenous peoples and veteran British forces in the Southeast, culminating in January 1815 with a remarkable victory in New Orleans that brought him fame and made him an attractive candidate for national office. An assortment of storytellers then took up the challenge of making this war hero into a president, and the mythmaking began. “ANDREW JACKSON was born a great man — he was born free,” concluded an 1818 biography that rapidly went through multiple editions. Not only did Jackson benefit from his free birth, according to S. Putnam Waldo, but as a westerner he could ascend unencumbered by “a monied or a landed aristocracy” like that which dominated the nation’s “settled” regions. There, “an insulated being … without the influence of friends to aid him, or without funds to procure them, can hardly hope, with the most gigantic powers, to place himself in eligible circumstances.” In “the new states,” however, Waldo asserted that “each individual may almost be said to make a province by himself.” There, Jackson could “rely solely upon intrinsic worth and decision of character, to enable him to rise rapidly with a rapidly rising people.” Waldo depicted a drama of “arduous toils, the severe privations and the excessive fatigues, by which he acquired his fame.” 

Despite Jackson’s good fortune through mentors, inheritance, and professional partners and connections, Waldo asserted that Jackson entered adulthood “entirely alone” and without “extrinsic advantages to raise him into life.” Continuing with that theme, “he sought no aid out of himself, and he received no aid but what he commanded by his own energy.” Neither Waldo nor anyone else mentioned Jackson’s squandered inheritance or numerous advantages. Waldo’s narrative contained all the elements of self-making praise, plus plenty of drama and links to “a rapidly rising people,” but still did not use the phrase itself. Jacksonian-era political combatants would soon thereafter utilize the phrase as they competed for the cultural authority that could support political authority. 

Pacesetting those competitions, Jackson’s allies devised a concerted storytelling campaign to make a president out of the “Hero of New Orleans.” Aiming for 1824, they built a network of supporters based in Nashville, Tennessee, but connected throughout the country to local political committees and newspapers. Sometimes, where favorable newspapers did not exist, they established them; their stories had to get into the wind. They raised partisanship to new heights, and in the hotly contested four-way presidential race of 1824, Jackson achieved a plurality in both the popular and electoral counts, only to lose the race in the House of Representatives. Allegations that a “corrupt bargain” had cost him the victory became a powerful rallying cry for the next four years, marshaled as evidence of the need for a hero who could reform national politics. The innovative and brilliant workings of that long campaign constructed and broadly disseminated the image of a self-made hero who could revive the true, pure spirit of America’s revolutionary generation, and who, like George Washington, was willing to sacrifice his peaceful rural retirement to serve the nation. Much of Jackson’s persona was refashioned for this campaign, including the fiction that he was a reluctant candidate. The outcome was a landslide victory in 1828. Stories — this story — mattered, not realities, and the election rewarded the mythmakers.

Along the way to 1828, candidates’ supporters began to tell stories in a language that had seen little use outside of moral judgment — condemning drunkenness or praising godliness —but was available to judge worthiness for the national stage. William Crawford of Georgia, one of the four leading presidential candidates in 1824, received the newly honorific term “self-made” in a lengthy 1824 essay Thomas H. Hall addressed to “The Freemen” of the North Carolina district he represented in Congress. Signaling that the phrase “self-made” was still germinal and unusual, he self-consciously attempted to define and elaborate it: “Crawford is what we call a self-made man; has risen from obscurity by his own exertions.” Hall contrasted Jackson with Crawford, who was a man of “integrity and ability” and whose “manners and deportment were always those of a polite gentleman.” According to Hall’s diatribe, Crawford could be self-made as self-improved even if not self-taught in Jackson’s rough manner. A space-filler “Maxim” highlighted at the end of this campaign piece declared simply: “Merit should be the only passport to office.” In that same North Carolina newspaper, an unsigned essay illustrated how the phrase could still be used to denounce rather than praise. Although the “nation owes him a large debt of gratitude,” a long list of Jackson’s actions exposed him as either “ignorant or despotic,” with “uncultivated notions of military tactics” and a mere “smattering knowledge of law.” From some perspectives, of course, those very attributes were beginning to sanctify Jackson as self-made in what was becoming its positive sense — but not in this partisan enemy’s camp. What is significant here is that the status of “self-made man” was still conditional, tentative, and subject to partisan debate: it was possible either to praise or deride with the concept. Self-making did not yet assure an indisputably heroic or positive narrative.

The next year, as the campaign accelerated toward 1828, an essay on Jackson’s behalf appeared in many venues, loaded with melodramatic descriptions of origins and triumphs that forcefully advanced the self-made myth, both as regards Jackson, and generically. It began, “If the present age can boast an ornament for whom history furnishes no example … that man is Andrew Jackson.” Because he had been “deprived in his boyhood” of his family, “he stood alone, and unassisted” like a “solitary oak that stands forlorn.” With “neither the pride of ancestry, nor the patronage of office – he was not the fondling of a dominant aristocracy, but had to struggle for subsistence in the darkest hours of adversity, and to encounter vicissitude after vicissitude” with only the forces of his “energy and self-possession.” Intriguing reflections mixed causal factors between the “Nature [that] designed him for a great man” and the “force of circumstances.” Neither influence alone could form a hero of such magnitude: “poverty, and self-reliance” had to combine with “natural qualities.” Thus, although “the ancients would have attributed the successes of Napoleon Bonaparte to the decrees of destiny,” in an era with “kings and sceptres alike sinking into unimportance, and non-entity,” it would be inappropriate to attribute Jackson’s rapid march “to honors, and popularity” simply to “fortune … [a] capricious deity.” Instead, “Talents, and not the auspices of supernatural protection” provided the foundation for both Napoleon’s and Jackson’s achievements. Fortunately, however, unlike “the conqueror of Europe,” Jackson was “the friend of man, the soldier of liberty” who would not “prostitute his principles at the unhallowed shrine of ambition.” Unlike the anti-aristocratic praise typical of the time for men who educated and improved themselves to serve, this hyperbole relieved its conquering hero of debts to any community. Instead, self-making appeared here, as it would increasingly in stories to come, to be the lonely success of a solitary oak that eclipsed the forest. Just as strikingly, this encomium to Jackson also denied that he had benefited from “supernatural protection,” which would have been heretical not too long before.

Two years after the fateful 1824 election, the heat of anti-aristocratic polemics on Jackson’s behalf continued to rise. A Jacksonian from Kentucky, Joseph Le Compte, told his congressional colleagues that Westerners worried that the practice of selecting presidents from previous Cabinet appointments as in 1824 was “likely to grow into a dangerous precedent.” The “hero of New Orleans” deserved esteem because he “was self-made; he rose by merit alone.” Not only had he “made” himself, but by saving “the great commercial city of New Orleans,” Jackson had “saved the Union.” Beyond the puffery, Le Compte contrasted his candidate, who “owes nothing to patronage,” to the elites who owed everything to it. That anti-aristocratic contrast animated the core of self-making’s force and appeal as it migrated outward from the moral spheres of preachers, educators, and public servants and into spheres of political power. 

This budding political genre of stories about self-making rarely aimed to set godly examples for youth, whether positive or negative, and focused instead on polemics about ambitious men. By the 1820s, the self-made man concept had begun to acquire enough cultural authority to make it an attractive rhetorical tool to enhance men’s portrayals and their claims on public resources, including esteem and votes. A story of self-making, however disconnected from fact, was becoming a form of political certification. It also highlighted contrasts between people who mattered in the public sphere and those who did not. Of course, White males alone had the potential for self-making in these myths and fables. Necessarily, everyone else and their contributions were rendered invisible. In stories of self-making that foregrounded the solitary oaks, the forests constituted by almost everyone else — women, people of color, the working classes, the poor, and even the putative “oak’s” own family and connections — were invisible, except as figures protected or subdued by the hero himself.

As a surprising reminder that nothing is fixed, intuitive, or self-evident about the ideology of self-making in America, in this early stage of its evolution people who were merely rich but did not engage in political competitions were also invisible as subjects of the myth. For example, John Jacob Astor built astounding wealth during these decades but had no religious or patriotic credentials and, therefore, did not qualify as self-made despite his relatively obscure origins. His time for those accolades would come in a few decades. Elites competing for political authority, on the other hand, were visible but ineligible for praise as self-made if their opponents identified them as aristocrats. In this new genre of folklore, elites’ self-improvement to serve, following the Founders’ models, did not guarantee prestige. A candidate’s initial advantages created toxic political disadvantages and had to be hidden. Thus, elites initially served anti-elitist mythmakers only as foils — until, that is, they figured out the game and turned it against their rivals in the coming decades.

But who were these “aristocrats” who, by contrast, ennobled the self-made? The category could include any number of figures, not just beneficiaries of inherited wealth or social benefits, but also formally educated people; businessmen who sought government subsidies for transportation projects, such as roads and canals, that would help them profit from their own investments; boosters who sought federal aid for projects that would advance their regions and the nation; or political appointees. Anyone might qualify as aristocratic, essentially, who stood as an obstacle to someone else’s ambitions. “Aristocrat” was becoming a catch-all political pejorative, contrasted against “self-made” as a catch-all political encomium. By the 1830s, one’s allies were best defended and promoted as self-made men, poaching the respected meanings of this phrase from the realms of preachers and public servants to justify ambitions and claims on public resources.

The profusion of broadly trumpeted political rhetoric in stories of self-made success made the concept available and attractive for other storytellers, including those wanting to praise preachers and other public figures for their self-improvement and service. For example, in 1843 a newspaper praised a then-esteemed but now-obscure preacher as “a self-made man in every sense.” In contrast, directly below that article, a single sentence announced, “The death of John Jacob Astor, for several years past regarded as the wealthiest man in the United States.” Merely getting rich did not yet qualify Astor as “self-made.” It took another revolution to spread that notion into the realm of riches, where successful businessmen like Astor resided. 

Across the second half of the 19th century, industrial and financial upheavals shaped that second revolution, which generated both astounding material abundance and harsh inequality. A cultural and political landscape arose in which the label “self-made” was available to wealthy titans as they sought esteem and power. That movement didn’t come without resistance, however, tied as it was to the century’s heated contests to define American ideals in tumultuous times. For example, after the Civil War, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, compiled biographies of “self-made men,” none of them wealthy, but all of them dedicated citizens, such as Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass. Despite her fame, her book sold poorly, whereas James McCabe’s The Great Fortunes was wildly successful with its biographies of rich men, including Astor. The rise of vast new fortunes and new media to tout them created a cultural landscape in which the myth of self-made success became a rhetorical tool for tycoons like Thomas Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Clay Frick as they and their supporters claimed cultural authority.

Since the late 19th century, the myth of self-made success has become so tightly linked to financial success that individual wealth seems like the term’s natural meaning. Nonetheless, the history of storytelling about self-making provides an antidote to that now taken-for-granted myth, reminding us of its origins in praise for public servants — and people who claimed to serve the public — not tycoons.

Excerpted from Self-Made: The Stories that Forged an American Myth by Pamela Walker Laird. Copyright © 2025 Pamela Walker Laird. Excerpted with permission of Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

Buy This Book

This green sheet — probably a ubiquitous part of Girl Scout life in the 1940s — is full of contrasts. We see the “wholesome” vision the Girl Scouts had idealized since the 1910s, a vision of “free,” “intrepid,” and “innocent” white girls, and the reality of the imprisonment young Japanese American girls and their leaders were experiencing. It leads us to consider the complicity of the Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA) in the imprisonment of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans, or Nikkei, during World War II, and it forces us to ask how the US government used the concepts of Girl Scout “courage” and “innocence” to hide the horrors of its imprisonment and treatment of Japanese Americans and Japanese in these incarceration centers. That list of names does something else, too: it pushes us to ponder what Japanese American girls and their parents made of their membership in this national organization that brought its badges, parades, troops, and pictures of cheery white girls into the incarceration centers.

In February 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the US Western Defense Command’s order to remove and incarcerate over 100,000 people of Japanese descent. Girl Scouts immediately became involved in this effort. Soon after the removal was ordered, the Seattle Girl Scout Council requested monies from the Girl Scout International Fund to help with what was euphemistically known as “evacuation” of girls in their area, one of the largest regions of forced relocation. At first the Girl Scout National Board voted to table the vote on Seattle’s request until they could gather more information from the American Red Cross, the Foreign Policy Association, and a scholar from Western Reserve University, Grace Coyle, who was, as the board put in its minutes, “making a study of the Japanese evacuation centers for the government.” Eventually, however, Constance Rittenhouse, the president of the national board, signed an agreement with the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to provide Girl Scouting in all the camps. Because the US government wanted to encourage “evacuee identification with groups typically American in concept,” it would help carry out a full Girl Scout program for girls ages seven to eighteen. In signing this official agreement with the WRA, the Girl Scouts was complicit in the business of indoctrination and incarceration.

Yet even before the national board made any decision, local councils were getting involved. At the Fresno Assembly Center, a temporary detention center in operation from May through October 1942, where Nikkei were taken before being sent to the permanent, more inland incarceration centers, the executive secretary of the Fresno Girl Scout Council gave lectures on leadership to the leaders of the newly formed troops in the assembly center. By September of that year, the national board had approved the decision to organize girls in incarceration centers as “lone troops,” meaning they weren’t affiliated with local councils and regions. The troops would be run under the direction of each center’s community service director, a WRA position, who would appoint troop leaders from among their own employees and from those imprisoned. The community service director would also serve as a permanent member of the troop’s advisory council. Girl Scout field directors, the same paid professionals that had made forays into the American Indian reservations and boarding schools, regularly visited the incarceration centers, giving talks on Girl Scouting and “leadership,” that ubiquitous yet somewhat unclear trait that Girl Scouting promotes throughout its history. Interestingly, by February 1943, the national board carried a motion that “national and local publicity on Girl Scout activities in Japanese relocation centers be permitted, emphasizing, however, that Girl Scouting had been undertaken in these centers at the request of the federal government.” In other words, all publicity was to obfuscate the Girl Scouts’ own agency in participating in the centers, deflecting responsibility to the government.

It’s not at all clear from these brief archival records what prompted the decision to avert responsibility. Was there concern about participating in the imprisonment of innocent people? Certainly by 1943 there was a national outcry about this injustice, even if it wasn’t mainstream, and one of the major sister organizations that the Girl Scouts recognized, the YWCA, had explicitly stated that the removal of Nikkei was about “race” and “war hysteria.” Was there concern that the quality of the programming would not be up to national standards, a frequent rationale used to legitimate discriminatory practices and segregated troops? Was there worry that Girl Scouting would somehow be tainted as an activity for unworthy “needy” girls, even enemies of the state? Would participation in the removal efforts somehow distract from Girl Scouts’ efforts to expand, as the national board of directors had approved the program “A Million or More by ’44” in 1942? While we don’t know the answers to these questions, we do know that the Girl Scouts agreed to participate in the incarceration centers, and unlike the YWCA, it came with no voiced disinclination to join in a racist endeavor. According to GSUSA records, by 1943, all the incarceration centers had Girl Scout troops. Giving the girl prisoners a taste of a group “typically American in concept,” the Girl Scouts played a key role in indoctrination at the incarceration camps, indoctrination that was in line with American foreign policy, with dominant ideals of white girlhood, and with a patriotic commitment to the nation. It was also an indoctrination rife with hypocrisy and contradiction. One of the first points of hypocrisy was the very term used to describe the prisoners — “evacuees” — suggesting that the imprisonment was for their own protection. Yet as one former prisoner noted, “If we were put there for our protection, why were the guns at the guard towers pointed inward, instead of outward?”

Girl Scout participation in the incarceration centers was very much in line with the history of the GSUSA. The arm of the Girl Scouts funding its program in Japanese American incarceration centers — the National Field Committee — had, up to this point, largely focused on bringing Girl Scouting to American Indian girls. Moreover, the fact that the Field Committee asked that monies be donated from the International Committee of the Juliette Low Memorial Fund also makes sense, as Japanese American girls were definitely understood by the national Girl Scout organization as “international,” not “domestic.” Girl Scouting could be brought to these Japanese (American) girls within this logic just as it was brought to the Chinese (American) girls in New York City and what they called Spanish (American) girls in the Southeast. I place “American” in parentheses because Girl Scouting definitely saw all these ethnic groups — Chinese, Japanese, Latina — as the foreigner within national boundaries. Working with the US government to create Girl Scout troops in incarceration centers also connected to the way the organization saw its mission as lending a helping hand and bringing an outlook and way of life designed to build character and health. As an institution it would legitimate and make sense of its work with incarcerated Nikkei girls as outreach and assistance, just as it had construed its forays into American Indian boarding schools as civilizing and uplift. 

Girl Scouting asked girls to feel loyal and to perform loyalty to a country that was imprisoning them. In both its philosophy and its programming, the Girl Scouts was at heart a patriotic endeavor, and this was drilled into scouts in the camps. Eva Koyama, a young girl imprisoned at Minidoka, in Idaho, tells her father about joining the Girl Scouts, adding, “Here is the Girl Scout Oath”:

On my honor, I will try To do my duty to God and my country To help other people at all times To obey the Girl Scout laws.

Duty to God and to country are in the same line, given equal weight, so for the imprisoned who felt it was constantly necessary to try to prove their loyalty to the United States, visible evidence of patriotism was very useful. Interestingly, both the visual and the written archival records of the incarceration centers provide many examples of Girl Scouts doing patriotic things. We learn about Girl Scouts planning Flag Day and Fourth of July events. We see them taking part in flag ceremonies, serving in bugle corps, and marching in parades. We learn that they raised money for veteran groups. For the girls and young women who were Girl Scouts, encouraged to take part in these motions of service and allegiance to country, the participation must have elicited extraordinarily conflicted feelings and mental dissonance as the incarceration centers and the Girl Scouts emphasized the necessity of embodying honor, respect, loyalty, and enthusiasm to the country that had imprisoned them and their families. Any examination of the Girl Scouts in the 20th century must emphasize how duplicitous the organization was in asking girls and women to demonstrate their “good citizenship” and their “patriotism” in a context where the United States had forcibly taken their homes and businesses, imprisoned them in often brutal conditions, and given them no particular reason to hope for their futures. It was a low moment for the Girl Scouts of the USA.

Emily Anderson, curator of the Coming of Age exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum, explained that for many families Girl Scouting was a particularly attractive organization before the war as it provided so much flexibility: The girls could be both “American” and “Japanese,” they could be both Buddhist and American, and they could be loyal to family and cultural traditions but also express their American patriotism and learn American cultural norms. Janet Sui Matarai Misaka, who was interviewed for the exhibit, provides a powerful example of the ways young women brought Girl Scouting into the incarceration centers. Ten years old when her family was forced to leave Mountain View, California, Misaka described herself as one of the “first Japanese Americans to join the troop in Mountain View,” a Brownie troop that was all white. With her mom’s help, she even won the cookie sale contest for the entire council. Movingly, she brought her Girl Scout Handbook with her to the camps; this detail really stands out, considering how little her family was able to bring and how difficult their relocation was. First they had to move to Santa Anita Assembly Center, a racetrack where she and her family were forced to live in converted horse stalls, and then to Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Within a month of her landing in Santa Anita, adults in the assembly center had begun Girl Scouting. Misaka recounted that the adults “got everything going fast to keep us out of trouble.” At Heart Mountain she remembered going with her troop down to the river, where they made little stoves out of cans and cooked some treats. She remembers making a memory album and learning how to build a stool. And they repeated the Girl Scout Promise, something she could do basically by heart even over 60 years later: “On my honor, I will try to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people at all times, to obey the Girl Scout laws.” When she finished reciting the Promise during the interview with Anderson, she started laughing wistfully and then reflected on the irony of her and other girls’ experiences with the Girl Scouts while imprisoned: “Well, we did all that. That’s what we did. We followed the Girl Scouts to the end.”

Toward the end of the war, government officials began a policy of moving people out of the incarceration centers to communities across the United States, in areas far from the West Coast. They turned to young women they identified as “exemplary” to safely serve as ambassadors throughout the country. These young women often went alone or in very small groups, as the point of resettlement was to break up what the government saw as a dangerous concentration of Japanese communities on the West Coast. Here, too, the Girl Scouts became involved, promising to have the various Girl Scou committees in the camps write to the councils where the girls and young women were moving, to encourage local troops to get in touch with and welcome the newcomers. The policy never seems to have been enacted in full, however, as the archival record includes statement after statement from the national board that the GSUSA will help resettle Japanese American girls, but there is no evidence that the GSUSA actually did it or that regional councils or local troops welcomed any of the girls. Before the war, the troops in California were largely segregated by ethnicity and class. After the war, however, GSUSA seemed particularly uninterested in creating any new troops for Japanese American girls, allowing only for the “possible assimilation of individual Girl Scouts.” This may seem progressive, as it would likely mean Nikkei girls integrating into already existing white, Black, and Mexican American troops, but it was probably more about ensuring that Nikkei communities did not reconstitute themselves after the war and instead dissolved into the nation.

Apparently, however, despite whatever publicity and letters the Girl Scout National Headquarters sent, local councils did not always welcome those who returned from the camps. A particularly painful example of this comes from Sally Kitano, who moved back to Bainbridge Island, Washington, after she and her family were imprisoned at the Manzanar concentration camp. She recalled:

When I got back to the island, a lot of the kids were, belonged to the Rainbow Girls. And that was, that was the thing to belong to. Okay, and then the other thing was joining the Girl Scouts. ’Cause I was in the scouting program before the war. And so I went up to the lady who ran the scouting program and I said, “Can I get back into the scouting program?” And she said, “Well, the kids are too far advanced now so I don’t think that you would fit in.” And I says, “Okay.” I mean, I accepted it. I was disappointed, very disappointed, but I said, “Okay. I understand that.” And then, but it wasn’t too long after that I found out that anybody can go join the Girl Scouts at any time.

After Kitano shares that she never rejoined the Girl Scouts, the interviewer asks her if any Japanese Americans joined. “Not at that time, no,” she answers. After which she adds, “I remember Remo, my classmate, said, ‘Well, let me see what I can do.’ You know, so she, so she had her mother call headquarters. And they said no, Japanese are not accepted. And that’s when I practically broke down and cried, ’cause I couldn’t get into anything. That was, that really hurt, I think.”

From Intrepid Girls: The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA by Amy Erdman Farrell. Copyright © 2025 by Amy Erdman Farrell. Used by permission of The University of North Carolina Press

Buy This Book

His concerns foreshadowed a broader national reckoning with identity and belonging that would ultimately change the face of the nation. America had once been populated largely by people from English-speaking, Protestant countries. But starting in the 1890s, a new tide of foreigners had been surging into the United States: Italians and east Europeans, Catholics and Jews. From dusty cowboy saloons of the west to the gentlemen’s clubs of New York, people were asking what it meant to be American, and just who should be allowed to become one.

Caminetti brought a tangled web of talents — and prejudices — to the job. As the son of an Italian immigrant, he knew the sting of slurs that might have given him a unique perspective. When running for the U.S. House of Representatives earlier in his career, one political enemy promised to live on macaroni and ravioli for a whole month if he was elected. Another, according to one account, hired a comedian to travel through his congressional district imitating the accented English of its Italian immigrants. Even Caminetti’s wife, Eliza (Ella) Ellington Martin, a WASP with roots stretching back to the American Revolution, after attending a Fourth of July speech he gave before they were married told a friend that it would have been better if “an American” had delivered the remarks. 

Yet for all the discrimination he faced, Caminetti failed to evince any sympathy for other newcomers, seeing them as competition rather than kindred spirits. And though he worried about immigrants generally, he was particularly concerned with those from Asia. A seemingly endless stream of men willing to work for lower wages seemed poised to descend upon the United States, stealing jobs and destroying American society with their unfamiliar cultural and religious beliefs. Already the United States had taken strict measures to limit immigrants from China and Japan. Caminetti believed the country faced yet another urgent threat, this time from India.  

Working men from India had first begun to arrive in the United States in the early years of the 20th century, many bitterly angry at British rule of their homeland. London had governed India as a colony since 1858, and through the East India Company for centuries before that, displaying such contempt that signs at British clubs famously read “Dogs and Indians Not Allowed.” Callous regulations crippled the ability of farmers to make a living.

Most landed at the Angel Island immigration center in San Francisco Bay, modeled on Ellis Island, and quickly discovered hostility almost as intense as what they experienced under the British. Immigration inspectors employed often capricious ways to keep Indians out, claiming they were likely to become public charges or carried diseases such as hookworm. Those who did make it into the country faced discrimination and even violence. Anti-immigrant groups such as the Asiatic Exclusion League were swelling in number, and communities up and down the West Coast turned on Indian workers, ransacking their homes and attacking them in the street in an effort to drive them from the country. By the time Caminetti arrived in Washington, only a few hundred a year were entering the United States.

Still, Caminetti remained on edge. With India’s population then over 250 million, he feared more would sneak into the country via American outposts such as Hawaii and the Philippines. And a decade after President William McKinley was assassinated by an anarchist, he noticed a disturbing tilt toward radical leftist ideology among the existing Indian immigrant community. 

In 1913, a group of Indian laborers and university students had formed a secretive organization named Ghadar, or revolt, that aimed to overthrow British rule in India. Based in San Francisco’s Mission District, they published a seditious newspaper and began raising money to launch an armed revolution back home. Although they were inspired by the Founding Fathers to rebel against colonialism, Caminetti feared their politics could be turned against the United States. Indeed, key leaders of the group, such as former Stanford University lecturer Har Dayal, openly embraced the far-left Industrial Workers of the World and even seemed to support anarchism. 

The only way to smash the Indian threat, Caminetti believed, was with legislation specifically designed to keep them out. He jumped at the opportunity to speak at congressional hearings on Indian immigration in early 1914, armed with mountains of figures and material. Some of his claims were outlandish, but his passion was undeniable, and he emerged as the star of the proceedings, capturing headlines around the country. One paper even speculated that Caminetti was receiving enough attention and praise to run for governor of California.

Adding to his sense of urgency, a spectacular challenge to Canada’s strict immigration laws was unfolding. A ship named the Komagata Maru had arrived in Vancouver harbor hoping to disembark over 300 prospective Indian immigrants. For some two months, the Canadians refused to let them ashore, leading to several dramatic confrontations between the passengers, immigration officers, and even the Canadian navy.

On June 12, as the crisis continued, Caminetti wrote to Secretary of Labor William Wilson that the Komagata Maru incident underscored the need for American lawmakers to act. “I feel that congress, if possible, be induced to pass some legislation regarding Hindus at the present session, and I suggest that the matter be made the subject of consultation with the president.”

Yet members of Congress and many Americans were not comfortable singling out one ethnicity so bluntly, and both the legislation and Caminetti’s political career failed to advance. 

Overcoming his disappointment, Caminetti seized a new opportunity to tackle immigration more broadly — the revival of the contentious literacy test. Back in the 1880s, three Bostonians, worried about the ability of immigrants to assimilate with existing American culture, had formed a group known as the Immigration Restriction League, arguing that all newcomers be able to read a brief text in their own language. 

Since then, Congress had twice passed literacy legislation, only to see it twice vetoed, first by President Grover Cleveland and a second time by President William Howard Taft. President Cleveland, capturing the mood of those who opposed the bill, argued it marked a “radical departure from our national policy relating to immigration,” a policy that had “encourag[ed] those coming from foreign countries to cast their lot with us and join in the development of our vast domain.” 

New literacy test legislation, championed by Alabama Rep. John Lawson Burnett, and Senator Ellison Smith of South Carolina, was gaining support. While it didn’t specifically target Indians, Caminetti held high hopes it would help him achieve his objective. Yet President Woodrow Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, held strong beliefs about the role of the United States as the shining city on the hill, a beacon to the rest of the world. He, too, vetoed the bill.

Over a year would pass before Congress would take a new crack at immigration legislation, introducing a bill very much like the literacy test. And having learned that targeting Indians directly was considered abhorrent, lawmakers from the West Coast devised a new strategy to single them out. Rep. Denver S. Church of California had been carefully drawing and bending lines through recommended maps of Asia that would show who could and could not enter the United States. To the untrained eye, it seemed like citizens of any number of countries might be caught up in the American restrictions. But there was little doubt that the map was drawn with Indians in mind.

The California Rep. Everis Hayes didn’t try to conceal the idea behind the work-around. Summarizing the map’s real purpose, he wrote: “This bill does not change existing conditions with reference to an Asiatic who comes or has been coming to the United States, except the Hindu. He is the only man whose status will be changed by this bill.” Even Secretary of State Robert Lansing could publicly state his support and in autumn of 1916, the new immigration bill sailed through Congress.

In response, on January 30, 1917, Wilson offered a single page of remarks about the bill that had been laid on his desk. “In most of the provisions of the bill I should be very glad to concur.” But he went on to state that he would again veto the bill. “I can not rid myself of the conviction that the literacy test constitutes a radical change in the policy of the Nation which is not justified in principle,” he wrote. “It is not a test of character, of quality, or of personal fitness, but would operate in most cases merely as a penalty for lack of opportunity in the country from which the alien seeking admission came.” This time, Burnett was waiting for him. On February 1, the House overruled Wilson’s veto by a comfortable margin. Three days later the Senate followed suit, and one day later what history would variously remember as the Immigration Act of 1917 or the Asiatic Barred Zone Act became law.

Caminetti was ecstatic. In his annual report written not long after, he said that although the Asiatic exclusion clause had been overshadowed by the fierce literacy-test debate, it was “in the bureau’s judgment, the most far-reaching and most beneficial provision of the Burnett-Smith Immigration Act.” Saying that the impact had not been “fully understood and appreciated,” he noted that it was already clear the bill had “settled the Hindu immigration problem, which a few years ago threatened to be one of the most distressing phases of immigration that the country had yet encountered.” The Asiatic exclusion clause, he claimed, “removed any possibility that the hordes of coolies who inhabit the islands adjacent to Asia or who are found throughout continent ever will be brought to the United States.”

In 1924, setting even tighter restrictions, Congress passed fresh legislation limiting the number of immigrants based on nationality ratios dating back to 1890. Not coincidentally, this maintained the white European character of U.S. immigration and essentially shut out Indians. Caminetti’s vision for America, built through restrictive, race-based immigration policies, would last until sweeping immigration reforms under Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965. 

Adapted from Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Copyright © 2025 by Scott Miller. All rights reserved.

Buy This Book

But even as Americans have made strides in how they remember and commemorate the civil rights struggle, police have succeeded in shifting attention away from their sophisticated repression of the movement. Not only have they concealed their record of political policing and slow violence, but they have done their utmost to obscure how activists in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) put the fight against police repression at the heart of the civil rights movement’s work.

A chief example of this revisionist approach can be seen in the National Law Enforcement Museum (NLEM) in Washington, DC. Authorized by Congress and opened in 2018, the NLEM is overseen by a board filled with representatives from police unions and advocacy organizations. Although it is privately funded, its congressional mandate and location mere blocks from the National Mall bestow it with an unofficial status as our country’s national museum of policing.

Dishonesty pervades the NLEM’s narration of the police role in the civil rights movement. “As Americans took to the streets to voice their opinions and demand their rights, and police sought to maintain order and enforce the law, some clashes turned violent,” an exhibit on the 1960s tells us, avoiding the question of whether police attacked peaceful protesters. Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety Bull Connor appears as a rogue police chief who was “widely condemned by law enforcement” for attacking protesters with dogs and fire hoses, a dubious claim considering how many law enforcement officials refused to speak out against the Birmingham police. As the museum reassures us, “Thankfully, with the 1970s came efforts to repair the rift, as many police departments renewed their commitment to diversity and community engagement.” As far as the National Law Enforcement Museum is concerned, police may have retaliated against protesters in the past — but not anymore.

Leading college textbooks reveal how police attempt to sanitize their relationship to the civil rights movement as well. One such title is An Introduction to Policing, a widely assigned text published by Cengage currently in its ninth edition. The book’s primary author, John Dempsey, completed a 24-year career with NYPD that began in 1964, the same year that undercover police spy Ray Wood infiltrated CORE and other civil rights groups in New York. In his textbook’s second edition, published in 1999, Dempsey wrote of the “adversaries on the street” whom he encountered early in his career as he “policed antiwar marches, civil rights demonstrations, and urban riots.” Like the National Law Enforcement Museum, Dempsey and his coauthors minimize and conceal the active role police played in sabotaging the movement. A recurring strategy is to collapse any difference between peaceful protest and urban rebellions, describing how “the struggle for racial equality reached its peak, accompanied by marches, demonstrations, and riots that burned down whole neighborhoods in U.S. urban centers” in the 1960s.

Another strategy is to cast police as unwitting political victims forced to carry out the orders of corrupt officials against protesters. “The police were caught between those fighting for their civil rights and the government officials (the employers of the police) who wanted to maintain the status quo, between demonstrating students and college and city administrators,” Dempsey and his coauthors tell readers. “The police received much criticism during these years. Some of it was deserved, but much of it was for circumstances beyond their control.” Police, in other words, were not active combatants against the civil rights movement but, rather, mere spectators conscripted into action by paymasters who did not have their backs. Such far-fetched claims of political neutrality are contradicted by the long record of police attacks on civil rights activists.

In clear acts of projection, Dempsey’s textbook and the NLEM decry the surveillance and invasions of privacy perpetrated by federal law enforcement against activists. Just as Dempsey condemns the “ugly political underside to Hoover’s expanded role for the FBI,” the museum disavows COINTELPRO as “inconsistent with American principles.” Both omit the fact that countless police departments across the country not only committed similar abuses but assisted with the Bureau’s counterintelligence efforts. Lest anyone doubt the NLEM’s embrace of political policing, the museum’s “covert ops” exhibit features a cheery graphic titled “How to Set Up a Wire Tap,” while its research center is endowed by the J. Edgar Hoover Foundation and named for the FBI director.

To their credit, Dempsey and his coauthors admit at least one truth about this history in their most recent edition published in 2019. “Although the civil rights movement was necessary in the evolution of our nation,” they concede, “the use of the police by government officials to thwart the movement left a wound in community relations that still has not healed.” For once, police and their backers have admitted their profession’s sabotage of the movement.

When U.S. congressman and former SNCC chairperson John Lewis died on July 17, 2019, Americans commemorated his passing with an outpouring of celebrations of his life and the civil rights movement. That summer, as the COVID pandemic raged, an estimated 15 to 26 million people protested for Black lives across the United States in the wake of the killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville and too many other acts of police violence to name. It would prove to be the largest wave of sustained political protest in American history, drawing frequent comparisons with the civil rights struggle of the 1960s.

Just one day after completing a round of chemotherapy, an emaciated Lewis made his last public appearance with a visit to the massive Black Lives Matter mural painted directly on Sixteenth Street in Washington, DC, on June 7. Days earlier, crowds of protesters had been teargassed there by U.S. Park Police and Secret Service so that they could clear a path for Donald Trump to display an upside-down Bible at a press conference in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Six weeks later, Lewis’ passing prompted countless commentators to place Lewis’ experience as a victim of police violence at the center of his story. Television coverage of his death almost invariably featured footage of law enforcement officers assaulting Lewis and his fellow protesters in Selma at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Indeed, the very first sentence of the New York Times obituary identified him as “a son of sharecroppers and an apostle of nonviolence who was bloodied at Selma and across the Jim Crow South in the historic struggle for racial equality.” Likewise, the opening line of the Washington Post obituary described Lewis as “a civil rights leader who preached nonviolence while enduring beatings and jailings during seminal front-line confrontations of the 1960s.”

The implication was that suffering through police violence — and not resisting it — defined Lewis and the movement. In his time as SNCC chairman, Lewis was among the movement’s most prominent critics of police violence. Curiously, when he passed almost no one remembered him that way. Though recollections of Lewis made liberal reference to ongoing Black Lives Matter protests, their message was clear: the departed civil rights leader had passed the torch to a new generation of activists who, unlike those in the 1960s, could finally confront that brutality head-on.

Fixated on the televised assault at Selma, Lewis’ obituaries overlooked the full array of slow violence Lewis had endured at the hands of police. Although some obituaries referenced the white mobs that set upon the Freedom Riders in Montgomery with baseball bats and metal pipes, knocking Lewis unconscious, virtually none mentioned that the attacks had been coordinated by members of the Montgomery police or that a federal court had ruled that officers had “acted in concert with the Klan groups herein named to commit acts of violence.” Lewis’ obituaries also failed to note the pervasive surveillance that SNCC endured during his chairmanship — not only by the FBI but also by local police in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Danville, Virginia. Indeed, the biggest speech of Lewis’ life, at the March on Washington, was surveilled by multiple police departments.

Some obituaries noted that movement leaders had forced Lewis to censor his own speech at the March because they feared that his criticisms of Kennedy’s civil rights bill threatened the legislation’s passage. But obituaries mentioned neither that the SNCC chairman’s address repeatedly denounced police violence — from physical brutality to retaliatory prosecutions— nor that those charges elicited loud cheers from the crowd of some 250,000 attendees. Lewis had brought his message condemning police violence to the largest audience that had ever gathered as part of the movement.

Indeed, it was during Lewis’ chairmanship that SNCC made combating state-sponsored violence a focal point of its work. Chief among these efforts was SNCC’s campaign against police in Americus, Georgia, in 1963, where police chief Ross Chambliss jailed a quartet of SNCC and CORE organizers on felony insurrection charges carrying the death penalty. “Legal terror is an old problem in the Black Belt communities of southwest Georgia,” Lewis remarked at a press conference publicizing affidavits from Americus residents who had been beaten by police and crammed with as many as 34 other protesters into tiny jail cells without beds. “The police state atmosphere that prevails in Americus today makes that city a little South Africa for Negroes,” Lewis protested further in a telegram to the U.S. Justice Department that August. Lewis did not reserve his criticisms for Southern police, either. “The use of police and military power to try to solve problems that Negroes are confronted with in the ghettoes and slums of our cities is an unspeakable mistake,” he warned in August 1965 as the LAPD and National Guard imposed martial law on Black Angelenos during the Watts uprising.

By ignoring this work, the coverage of Lewis’ life perpetuated two dangerous myths: one, that civil rights organizers with saint-like perseverance suffered through police violence without fighting back and, two, that physical attacks such as those at Selma were the dominant form of violence perpetuated by police against the movement. In fact, many police understood the political risks of naked physical brutality and attacked the movement in ways more acceptable to the political mainstream. Retaliatory prosecutions, invasive surveillance, and covert collaborations with vigilante mobs were all more effective means of undermining the movement while minimizing political damage to police.

The public’s virtual amnesia about the slow violence by police that SNCC both experienced and resisted stands in marked contrast to the widespread fascination with the FBI’s actions against Martin Luther King. If historians in recent years have succeeded in dislodging King as the overwhelming focus of movement histories, we have failed to decenter him in our accounts of repression of the Black freedom struggle. Again and again, that story is told as a battle between two men, King and J. Edgar Hoover. In these stories, Hoover is the ultimate law enforcement villain against whom all others are measured. Meanwhile, Lewis and his comrades are remembered as victims who endured police brutality— not organizers in a broader fight against state repression.

Excerpted from Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back. © 2025 by Joshua Clark Davis. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Buy This Book