When women first voted in national elections following ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920, participants in the women's movement and others predicted that women voters would be an important factor in a shift toward increased social legislation and anti-corruption in politics. An estimated one-third of the eligible female voters actually voted in 1920, compared to two-thirds of eligible male voters. Women's impact on national elections was not felt to a significant degree until the 1952 election, when the proportion of women voting for Dwight D. Eisenhower was six percent higher than the percentage the candidate pulled among men. Before the 1956 presidential election, the popular magazine Collier's sent writer Walter Davenport to bipartisan Marion Country, Indiana, to survey women's attitudes on candidates and issues. Many of the women whose views Davenport included in the resultant article refuted accepted beliefs of seasoned male politicians. Their paraphrased opinions, however, also employed essentialist gender stereotypes of the time--that "women are all house cleaners at heart" and that "a woman lacks the administrative qualities of a man"--to explain perceived voting tendencies. Davenport's findings ignored factors that social scientists have considered to be important in accounting for voting patterns, such as education, income level, age, and race. He did, however, report the opinion of two female teachers that the formation of women's groups during and since World War II--when more women joined the workforce--had resulted in increased political consciousness among women, an opinion that scholars have since found valid. Although by the 1964 election, more women were voting than men, a viable national female voting bloc has not surfaced in the U.S.

In February 1899, British novelist and poet Rudyard Kipling wrote a poem entitled "The White Man's Burden: The United States and The Philippine Islands." In this poem, Kipling urged the U.S. to take up the "burden" of empire, as had Britain and other European nations. Theodore Roosevelt, soon to become vice-president and then president, described it as "rather poor poetry, but good sense from the expansion point of view." Not everyone was as favorably impressed as Roosevelt. In one of many parodies of "The White Man's Burden" from the time, labor editor George McNeill penned the satirical "Poor Man's Burden," published in March, 1899.

Attorney-General Edwin Meese's Commission on Pornography was appointed during Ronald Reagan's second presidential term to appease conservative and fundamentalist supporters who felt the Reagan Revolution" had not sufficiently altered the nation's social agenda. During 1985 and 1986

Edward Gould Buffum (1820-1867) went to California in 1846 as a soldier in a New York regiment during the Mexican War. There, Buffum and his regiment helped wrest California from Mexico. After his discharge from the army, Buffum remained to pan gold in the area around John Sutter's sawmills where it had just been discovered. A journalist by profession, Buffum recorded his experiences in a book, Six Months in the Gold Mines, from which this excerpt comes. He commented with wonder that men in the California gold mines earned one hundred dollars per day on average. To understand what a fortune this was, consider that women working as domestic servants in northeastern cities at this time earned between four and seven dollars per month.

By Around 1903, employers began to mount organized campaigns to break the power of labor unions, particularly in the metal trades. Employers had a broad array of weapons in their arsenal, including blacklists, strikebreakers, and court injunctions against strikers' use of boycotts and sympathy strikes. Although early twentieth-century employers had reliable allies in state police forces and tightly controlled local police, they continued to hire their own private police--detective agencies that used secret operatives to disrupt unions and supplied thugs to protect strikebreakers during strikes. This 1917 ad for the Cleveland-based Joy Detective Agency appeared in American Industries, the official publication of the National Association of Manufacturers.

President Lyndon Johnson formed an 11-member National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders in July 1967 to explain the riots that plagued cities each summer since 1964 and to provide recommendations for the future. The Commission's 1968 report, informally known as the Kerner Report, concluded that the nation was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." Unless conditions were remedied, the Commission warned, the country faced a "system of 'apartheid'" in its major cities. The Kerner report delivered an indictment of "white society" for isolating and neglecting African Americans and urged legislation to promote racial integration and to enrich slums--primarily through the creation of jobs, job training programs, and decent housing. President Johnson, however, rejected the recommendations. In April 1968, one month after the release of the Kerner report, rioting broke out in more than 100 cities following the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In the following excerpts from the Kerner Report summary, the Commission predicted a grim future for American cities unless the nation undertook concerted actions leading to "a true union--a single society and a single American identity." In 1998, 30 years after the issuance of the Report, former Senator and Commission member Fred R. Harris co-authored a study that found the racial divide had grown in the ensuing years with inner-city unemployment at crisis levels. Opposing voices argued that the Commission's prediction of separate societies had failed to materialize due to a marked increase in the number of African Americans living in suburbs.

At the close of the American Revolution the British ignored their Indian allies and ceded all British lands from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River to the new United States. Increasing numbers of settlers in the Ohio Valley often skirmished with the many woodland Indian peoples who stayed on their ancestral lands. President Washington sent the first of three armies into the region in 1790. When the first two expeditions failed, Washington turned to General Anthony Wayne. After his victory in the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1795, Wayne staged an elaborate ceremony at Fort Greenville to recognize American sovereignty over the land and his paternalistic authority over the Indians. Little Turtle, a Miami leader integral to the first two Indian victories, balked at Wayne's terms and was the last Indian participant to agree to cede two thirds of northern Ohio and southeastern Indiana. In exchange, the Americans agreed to Indian occupancy of the remaining lands. But this agreement was not to last for long.

As U.S. soldiers returned from Europe in the aftermath of World War I, scarce housing and jobs heightened racial and class antagonisms across urban America. African-American soldiers, in particular, came home from the war expecting to enjoy the full rights of citizenship that they had fought to defend overseas. In the spring and summer of 1919, murderous race riots erupted in 22 American cities and towns. Chicago experienced the most severe of these riots. The most detailed and sober reporting of the causes of the 1919 Chicago race riot came retrospectively from the interracial Chicago Commission on Race Relations. The Commission published a seven hundred-page report in 1922, The Negro in Chicago. Charles Johnson--a Chicago Urban League official, the associate executive secretary of the integrated commission, and the principal author of its report--hoped that by thoroughly describing the sentiments and living conditions of African Americans and the similarities between European immigrants and recent black migrants to Chicago, the report would generate sympathy for the city's black community. Filled with photographs, charts, and maps, The Negro in Chicago carefully dissected Chicago's racial problems, including black and white antagonism over housing, jobs, and crime.

In 1968, young urban-based American Indians in Minnesota formed the American Indian Movement (AIM) to fight mistreatment by police and to improve prospects for jobs, education, and housing. In 1972, AIM initiated "The Trail of Broken Treaties," and a subsequent march to Washington to present the Nixon administration with a 20-point sovereignty proposal. From its beginning, AIM suffered from disagreement between "traditionals" holding reservation-oriented agendas and urban-based "progressives". By the end of the 1970s, plagued by repression and internal disputes, AIM declined as a leading militant organization. In the following document written in 1974, Jimmie Durham of AIM's American Indian Support Committee, critically addressed attitudes of white progressives that had caused friction within the group. The paper, which Durham, a Cherokee Indian, has acknowledged was influenced by Marxist writers, was subsequently doctored by the FBI and submitted to Tribal Councils and the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security to discredit him. (The version appearing below is excerpted from Durham's published original and reprinted with his permission.) In 1974, Durham founded the International Indian Treaty Council to lobby the United Nations towards decolonization of indigenous peoples worldwide. The Treaty Council helped create the 1977 UN conference on indigenous affairs, attended by representatives of 98 indigenous peoples. Durham subsequently resigned from the Treaty Council and he has become an acclaimed artist and poet, writing on cultural and political subjects.

In the early 20th century, progressive education reformers promoted a pedagogy that emphasized flexible, critical thinking and looked to schools for the political and social regeneration of the nation. The founding of the Progressive Education Association (PEA) in 1919 accompanied the growing prestige of leading educational theorists at Teachers College, Columbia University. Increasingly, however, the movement became preoccupied with methodology and, specifically, with the controversial "child-centered" approach, later criticized by both radicals and conservatives. Imbued with Freudianism and child psychology, the child-centered method asked teachers to position each child at the center of the learning process by focusing activities around the interests of the pupil. William H. Kilpatrick, a professor at Teachers College, outlined the theory of "wholehearted purposeful activity" by a child as the pinnacle of postwar progressive education in the following, widely-read essay, initially published in the Teachers College Record in 1918.

In 1887, Henry F. Bowers founded the nativist American Protective Association (APA) in Clinton, Iowa. Bowers was a Mason, and he drew from its fraternal ritual--elaborate regalia, initiation ceremonies, and a secret oath--in organizing the APA. He also drew many Masons, an organization that barred Catholics. The organization quickly acquired an anti-union cast. Among other things, the APA claimed that the Catholic leader of the Knights, Terence V. Powderly, was part of a larger conspiracy against American institutions. Even so, the APA successfully recruited significant numbers of disaffected trade unionists in an era of economic hard times and the collapse of the Knights of Labor. This secret oath taken by members of the American Protective Association in the 1890s revealed the depth of Protestant distrust and fear of Catholics holding public office.

In the late 1940s, large labor unions and major corporations worked out an accord that would guide labor-management relations for the next quarter century. During this period, unions benefited from high wages and relative stability, while relegating company decision-making to management. Many workers in certain geographic areas and sectors of employment, however, were not affected by the accord. In "union-free" Gainesville, Georgia, union representatives had started to organize a predominately female workforce in a large poultry plant. In the following statement to a House subcommittee on labor-management relations, Roy F. Scheurich, vice-president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America related a violent mob attack led by company officials. Joseph M. Jacobs, the union's general counsel, then argued that language in the Taft-Hartley Act, which regulated labor-management relations, allowed employers "apparent immunity" from legal responsibility for mob violence against labor representatives unless direct involvement could be proven. The Taft-Hartley Act, passed in 1947 by a Republican-led Congress over President Harry S. Truman's veto, amended provisions of the 1935 Wagner Act. Jacobs argued for restoration of the Wagner Act's language. In September 1951, one month after this hearing, a trial examiner for the National Labor Relations Board held the Jewell Company liable for instigating the riot described in the statement.

In 1918, a U.S. Employment Service Bulletin estimated that 75,000 unemployed laborers in Puerto Rico were available for work in the United States. The War Department agreed to transport workers to labor camps in the United States where they would be housed and fed while working on government construction contracts at defense plants and military bases. Many of these work camps, however, subjected the new migrants to harsh conditions and even forced labor, which Rafael Marchn described in his 1918 deposition to the commissioner of Puerto Rico. Workers like Marchn appealed to the U.S. government to improve sanitary conditions, provide adequate food, and stop widespread beatings at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina. In 1918 and 1919, almost one hundred Puerto Rican migrants died in Arkansas labor camps.

Eighteenth-century New Englanders increasingly found themselves living within the imperial context of the European wars and Enlightenment ideas that flowed across the Atlantic. John Barnard, the long-time minister of Marblehead, Massachusetts, was influenced by those ideas. He took the traditional path toward becoming a Congregational minister by attending an English school, grammar school, and then Harvard College, the main supplier of the region's clergy and integral to its intellectual life. While Barnard held traditional providential beliefs in God's responsibility for events, his life history also revealed an increasing layer of newer scientific beliefs and values. Less isolated than their 17th-century predecessors, the New England ministry at the turn of the 18th century traveled to Europe and took part in the increasing English book trade that brought European ideas to them, as seen in Barnard's autobiography.

Religious concepts and metaphors suffused the words and ideas of many late nineteenth-century American workers. The New and Old Testaments provided not only personal succor to many working people but also a set of allusions and parables they applied directly to their lives and struggles in industrial America. Working-class ideas and writing often were cast in stark millenarian terms, with prophesies of imminent doom predicted for capitalists who worshipped at Mammon's temple and imminent redemption for hard-working, long-suffering, and God-fearing laboring men and women. Christ was uniformly depicted in workers' writing as a poor workingman put on Earth to teach the simple principles of brotherhood and unionism. In this 1894 hellfire-and-brimstone editorial in The United Mine Workers Journal, "Pumpkin Smasher" counseled the "honest workman" to have faith in the ultimate punishment of those responsible for making miners' lives harsh and brutal.

President Franklin Roosevelt's 1937 attempt to expand the federal judiciary, known as his "Court-packing plan" by its many critics, met with ferocious opposition. Congressmen who had warily supported the New Deal now backed away, unnerved by the president's willingness to subvert the existing power structure. In the popular press, columns such as Dorothy Thompson's from the Washington Star reflected both popular disgust at Roosevelt's plan to increase the number of Supreme Court justices and FDR's continued popularity. Thompson's comparison of Roosevelt to Hitler seems ridiculous now, but others (like Father Charles Coughlin) made such comparisons regularly in 1937. Ironically, over the next four years FDR was able to fill seven vacancies on the Court, largely ending its opposition to the New Deal. By then, however, thanks in large part to public opposition to the Court-packing plan, he had lost the predictable majorities that had easily carried his bills through Congress during his first term.

Whereas the Knights of Labor had advocated "abolition of the wages system," union leaders who coalesced behind Samuel Gompers and the new American Federation of Labor in 1886 were more likely to accept the terms of the existing capitalist system. Gompers and his closest associates rejected any interest in creating a new society. Instead, they called for a better life for working people. Adolph Strasser, a leader of the cigarmakers' union, clearly articulated this emerging philosophy of "pure and simple unionism" in his 1883 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Education and Labor, which was investigating the "relations between capital and labor." Strasser had emigrated to America around 1871. In the early 1880s--around the time of this testimony--he allied with Gompers in refusing to turn over New York's United Cigarmakers union to socialists who had been democratically elected. Instead, he and Gompers expelled the leader of the socialists and caused a serious split in the union. Strasser remained an AFL leader and organizer until his death in 1910.

A 1923 billboard advertisement for Endicott-Johnson shoes touted employee satisfaction as an important feature of the product. Company president George F. Johnson was a leading proponent of welfare capitalism

In both Britain and the United States, Quakers were among the first to denounce slavery in the 18th century. This was due to the efforts of Quaker abolitionist leaders such as John Woolman. Born in New Jersey in 1720, Woolman was a tailor and shopkeeper. Continual encounters with slavery in his own neighborhood--notably an incident in which his employer asked him to write out a bill of sale for a slave--convinced him that he could not, in good conscience, continue to have anything more to do with slavery. In 1756, the year he began his journal, he gave up most of his business to devote himself to anti-slavery. This selection from Woolman's journal, published in 1774 after his death, records a trip in May 1757, through Maryland and Virginia, to spread his anti-slavery message among fellow Quakers.

In the mid-19th century, moral reformers viewed the saloon with unmitigated outrage. By the turn of the 20th century, though, anti-liquor groups such as the "Committee of Fifty" attempted to take a more dispassionate look at the saloon and its appeal to workingmen. Their goal was to displace the saloon by sponsoring non-liquor centered "substitutes." These efforts largely failed, but reformers' inquiries produced highly informative descriptions of saloon life at the end of the 19th century. The following article by sociologist Royal Melendy on "The Saloon in Chicago," published in 1900, conveyed a sense of how the saloon met a range of urban workers' social, economic, and cultural needs. Melendy's use of the term "workingman" emphasized the male character of the saloon. This should not be taken to mean that working-class women did not drink, but that drinking frequently took place at home. Some women, however, especially German and English immigrants, did drink in saloons and beer gardens.