Gilded Age and Progressive Era American History

The Naval Stores Industry as a Catalyst for Urbanity in Florida and Georgia in the Early to Mid Twentieth Century: A Study of Architectural and Material Culture

Mike Walker

MFA Student, Savannah College of Art and Design


ABSTRACT:

The naval stores or turpentine industry was a leading economic force in the South in the early to mid twentieth century and the manufacture of turpentine required labor-intensive harvesting of pine rosin deep in remote forests, but much of the work also was done in urban centers. These same localities grew in size and wealth due to the naval stores industry and the infrastructure required for processing and transshipment of naval stores products, producing some of the first real industrial and urban material culture of cities in northern Florida and southern Georgia. For cities such as Jacksonville, Lake City, Valdosta, and Pensacola, naval stores provided the economic impetus for markers of twentieth century modernity such as skyscrapers and sophisticated ports.

This paper examines the architectural, planning, and material culture developments brought about by the naval stores industry in northern Florida and southern Georgia and the relationship of this industry on a socioeconomic level to the cities where it was a catalyst to growth. In the wake of the Civil War, naval stores for relatively isolated Southern communities provided a means of economic recovery, but its benefits were not at all uniform and predictably, were reaped mostly by those at the top. The legacy of naval stores and its relationship with Florida and Georgia communities remains to this day, if hidden beneath the surface.

The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 resulted in multilateral agreements that codified the principle of international arbitration as a tool for avoiding war as well as some rules to govern the means and methods of warfare.  But those who advocated for the abolition of war, for disarmament, and for the creation of mandatory alternative dispute resolution processes were only marginally successful in getting nations to agree.  The instruction provided by the United States government to its delegates at each conference did not reflect the broad desires of the peace movement.  Full realization of the goals of the pacifists within the peace movement was incompatible with realpolitik. The nations of the world were unwilling to abandon the use of war as a tool of statecraft.  In addition, through the course of the 19th century, the peace movement had fragmented into different groups with emphases ranging from absolutist pacifists to those who favored more practical measures to limit war and its effects. The fragmented state of the movement rendered it unable to compete with the political strength of the realpolitik positions.
However, these observations provide only limited answers to the question of influence the peace movement had on these Conferences and the development of international law and diplomacy. Previous historiography on the peace movement fails to fully credit how the peace movement had succeeded by contributing to the development of international relations.  The peace movement of the late 19th and early 20th century represents an early example of the role of transnational civil society in foreign relations, the beginnings of “polylateral diplomacy.”  Examining the role of the peace organizations from this perspective provides valuable insight into where, how, and why efforts of different aspects of the peace movement succeeded or failed. 
Following a brief overview of the existing historiography, this paper will provide an alternative perspective.  It will argue that the role played by the American peace movement regarding the 1899 and 1907 Peace Conferences at the Hague is consistent with the early development of transnational civil society and reflected early characteristics of what is now referred to as polylateral diplomacy.

keywords: legal history, monopoly, prior appropriation, property theory, water history

Making extensive use of archival and other primary sources, David Schorr demonstrates that the development of the “appropriation doctrine,” a system of private rights in water, was part of a radical attack on monopoly and corporate power in the arid West. Schorr describes how Colorado miners, irrigators, lawmakers, and judges forged a system of private property in water based on a desire to spread property and its benefits as widely as possible among independent citizens. He demonstrates that ownership was not dictated by concerns for economic efficiency, but by a regard for social justice.

Reviewed in Agricultural History, American Historical Review, Arizona Water Resource, Business History Review, Environmental History, Hastings West-Northwest Journal of Environmental Law & Policy, Journal of American History, Pacific Historical Review, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, University of Denver Water Law Review, Water History, Western Historical Quarterly, Western Legal History

Middle-class progressives in the early 20th Century wanted to transform a corrupt and chaotic industrial America into an "authentic" democracy. But they were led astray by their privilege. Focused on enhancing the voices of individuals, generations of progressives remained blind to the rich culture of "democratic solidarity" infusing labor unions and organizing in poor communities. This book traces the problematic evolution of progressive democracy in America, focusing on schools as a key site of progressive practice. At the same time, it examines alternative strategies for developing more empowering approaches to democratic education and collective action.

There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the "organizational synthesis." A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by

The most successful mining town at the height of this western mining boom was Leadville, but like most Western mining towns, its establishment was unintentional, and only became permanent after several failed attempts to settle. Leadville’s early years were exciting; many prospectors were able to live out their fantasies and get rich quickly. That was the vision the newspapers tried to sell the public and those hopeful individuals looking for wealth. The reality was far different, and prospectors soon were disillusioned. Within a couple of years, Leadville became an established city with all the problems and conveniences. As long as there was still silver to be mined the dreams of grandeur remained, but when the United States repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in 1893, the dreams vanished; prospectors lost their wealth and the repeal ruined lives. A harsh reality set in and Leadville had to look for new ways to reinvent its economy are else it would become a distant a forgotten ghost town and a reminder of an era long gone. Horace Tabor and wife Baby Doe, outlaws Jesse and Frank James, Doc Holiday’s last chapter after Tombstone  and the unsinkable Molly Brown.

Debunking the common laissez-faire myth surrounding turn-of-the-century American foreign relations allows for a reconceptualization of American imperialism from 1890 to 1913. The Republican Party, the party of protectionism, found itself riven by internal disagreements over the future of the protectionist system and U.S. imperial expansion. From within Republican protectionist ranks arose a progressive wing that increasingly looked beyond the home market for the country’s growing American agricultural and manufacturing surpluses. They did so against staunch anti-imperial opposition not only from American free-trade independents, but also from the Republican Party’s isolationist home-market protectionists, who yet feared or disdained foreign markets and colonial acquisitions. These progressive Republican proponents of empire combined coercive trade reciprocity with protectionism—an expansive closed door—and worked hard to extend American imperial power through informal means of high tariff walls, closed U.S.-controlled markets, and retaliatory reciprocity if possible, by formal annexation and military interventionism when necessary. The American Empire thus arose owing to the imperialism of economic nationalism, not the imperialism of free trade.

Many scholars, including Mark Carnes and Mary Ann Clawson, have noted that the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the ‘golden age of fraternity’ in the United States. These years, during which America transformed from a rural society with an economy based in agriculture to an urban nation funded by industrial manufacturing, were also a time of frauds, hucksters, and charlatans who exploited the country’s rapid changes as opportunities to enrich themselves at the expense of others. This paper examines the career of Darius Wilson, who founded the Royal Arcanum, assumed the title of ‘Grand Master of the Venerable Symbolic Grand Lodge Ancient Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry for the United States of America’, and claimed to have developed a cure for deafness. Between 1875 and 1915, Wilson was both hailed for providing insurance to poverty-stricken immigrants and decried as a fraud who foisted worthless fraternal, medical and financial certificates upon a credulous public. A resident of Boston, Massachusetts, Wilson was a member or Rochester, New York’s Yonnondio Lodge No. 163, F. & A.M., before he was expelled. Subsequently he was repeatedly arrested and tried for improperly selling masonic degrees. Wilson provides a case study for the exploration of issues of authority, legitimacy, and confidence within the American industrializing economy, and will provide new perspectives for understanding fraternalism at the birth of the twentieth century.

To many foreigners, America was the land of opportunity, where the streets were paved with gold. Unfortunately, 'gold' tended to be sludge from a lack of sewer systems, and the opportunities were more for the rich and abled. Poverty, bigotry, street and white collar crime infested in cities across the country. Progressives, people who wanted to push for modernization and change in areas from sexism to free trade, can be credited for the changes in law and ideology in the early twentieth century. Journalists who exposed the nitty gritty truths of society, who took images of overpopulated ghettos and documented political corruption were called muckrakers, and Upton Sinclair was one of them. Upton Sinclair, whose controversial writing pushed him into the limelight, can be credited for some of the reforms established during the early 1900s. His book, The Jungle , features the life of Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant and meatpacker in Chicago during the turn of the century. Much of his work highlighted the plights and horrible working conditions many workers experienced; poor sanitation, health risks, discrimination and appalling works hours and wages were the reality for many employees. In

Dalton education is the largest educational reform movement in the Netherlands. Around eighty years ago it spread throughout the world; Dalton education was found in the USA, England, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, India, China and Japan. Today there is a revival of interest in England and Germany. We examine the origins of Dalton education by comparing the work of its founder Helen Parkhurst (1886–1973) with developments in American education towards the end of the nineteenth century. From 1870 onwards, in numerous American cities, there were experiments with alternatives for lockstep teaching, including experiments with individualised instruction, individual assignments, differentiation, self-direction, self-pacing, freedom, tutor learning and co-operation. In part, these innovations stemmed from methods that were already customary prior to the dissemination of lockstep teaching – methods which, at the onset of the twentieth century, were actually still common in rural one-room schools. The Dalton Plan proves to be not very original. Parkhurst recycled various ideas and methods which had already been developed and tried out in the preceding decades. Her pretension of having introduced something new and authentic is implausible. That raises two questions: how to explain the discrepancy between the image Parkhurst presents of her own work and the image derived from historical comparison, and how to explain the popularity of the Dalton Plan in the 1920s, given that it was not unique or particularly innovative.

As Boston’s largest non-Protestant groups in the nineteenth century, Irish Catholics and Central European Jews played an important role in challenging the Yankee notion that the only true Bostonian had ancestors who came over on the Mayflower. Jewish and Irish leaders created networks of communal institutions, including religious organizations, philanthropic institutions, cultural societies, and political clubs, to aid group adjustment. Such support was crucial, they believed, for promoting upward mobility and group respectability. However, the rise of both groups was fraught and each faced unique challenges in gaining economic, political, and social power, acceptance, and respect.

H. G. Wells was one of the most celebrated writers in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Famed for his innovative fiction, he was also an influential advocate of socialism and the world state. What is much less well-known is that he was a significant contributor to debates about the nature of social science. This article argues that Wells’s account of social science in general, and sociology in particular, was shaped by an idiosyncratic philosophical pragmatism. In order to demonstrate how his philosophical arguments inflected his social thought, it explores his attack on prevailing theories of race, while also highlighting the limits of his account. The article concludes by tracing the reception of Wells’s ideas among social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Although his programme for utopian sociology attracted few disciples, his arguments about the dynamics of modern societies found a large audience among social scientists and political thinkers.

A central pillar of contemporary conspiracy theories is the notion that all modern wars were secretely plotted and instigated by the Federal Reserve Bank. In these circles, the founding of the so called "Creature from Jekyll Island" in 1913 is considered a coup d'état of the international haute finance which enabled the U.S.'s entry into World War One a year later and the building of the American Empire. Also right-wing libertarians critical of U.S. foreign interventions like the U.S. Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul have led a long struggle to "End the Fed" (as his 2009 book is called), and signs to "End the Fed" could also be seen at demonstrations of the international Occupy movement leading to heated debates and confrontations. Against these conspiracy theories and drawing on key American historians' debates, this paper scrutinizes the actual historical origins of the 1913 Federal Reserve Act and shows that the founding of the Federal Reserve took place not in a period of defeat but rather the advance of subaltern social forces and that the Federal Reserve Act is an embodiment of a historic compromise between various social classes and class fractions in the political economy of the United States prior to World War One. Drawing on the theoretical tradition of neo-Gramscianism, the paper argues that the emergence of a U.S. variant of a central bank is best understood in terms of Antonio Gramsci's concept of "trasformismo" which, in an historically open-ended process, created the Federal Reserve and a U.S. variant of "social imperialism" as a result of the "law of unintended consequences" of historical social movements. In other words, the American Empire was not the result of a devious plan by an all-powerful American or transnational ruling class, but rather its Making was the consequence of a political process in which subaltern social forces, unable to fundamentally challenge the existing power structure as such, are co-opted, absorbed and inscribe themselves into that very structure.

Read throughout the world, H. G. Wells was one of the most famous political thinkers in the early twentieth century. During the early 1900s he elaborated a bold, idiosyncratic, and controversial cosmopolitan socialist vision. In this article I offer a new reading of Wells’s political thought. I argue that he developed a distinctive pragmatist philosophical orientation, which he synthesised with his commitments to evolutionary theory. His pragmatism had four main components: a nominalist metaphysics; a verificationist theory of truth; a Jamesian “will to believe”; and a vision of philosophy as an exercise oriented to improving practice. His political thought was shaped by this philosophical orientation. Wells, I contend, was the most high-profile pragmatist political thinker in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Such an understanding requires a re-evaluation of both Wells and the history of pragmatism.

The authors describe artifacts made shortly after the 1908 earthquake in San Francisco, by two noted artisans whose work influenced the aesthetics of that city's rebuilding, according to the aesthetics of the California Arts and Crafts Movement. The particularities of such artifacts are discussed, along with special considerations for their conservation treatment.

The article appeared as a chapter of a book published by the Getty Conservation Institute and edited by Valerie Dorge and F. Carey Howlett (the proceedings of a symposium organized by the Wooden Artifacts Group of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works and presented at Colonial WIlliamsburg in November of 1994).

In the early 20th century, mental speed became a dominant measure of intelligence in the United States. For both cultural and technical reasons, this had not always been the case. For 19th-century Americans, quickness of speech and thought often signified lack of self-discipline. Unlike with other objects of temporal measurement and rationalization such as factory work, little scientific or popular consensus existed over how to clock the invisible phenomenon of thought. The cultural and scientific ascent of mental speed thus poses an unsolved historical problem: how and why did Americans adopt this new ideal of intelligence? This essay offers an answer in the introduction and pop-ularization of a new and controversial practice: the timed test. The first timed tests did not so much formalize an existing conception of mental efficiency as establish a new one, using one of the key tools of measurement available to experimental psychology, the mechanical timekeeper. Initially frustrated in their efforts to correlate their subjects' laboratory-measured reaction time with socially recognized achievements such as academic grades, psychologists in the late 1890s borrowed a still-obscure concept from stenography and teleg-raphy: words per minute. At first, few scientists or members of the public equated reading, speaking, writing, and listening rate with intelligence. Only after American educators, military recruiters, and vocational guidance experts began to adopt timed testing in the 1910s for administrative convenience did mental speed begin to indicate intelligence and knowledge. What began as a way

In this unfinished rough powerpoint for a series of lectures I explore why the United States is markedly different from other representative democracies and welfare states.  I trace the tradition of using a combination of bribery and corruption of the Congress and Judiciary, and violence and racist terror as a means of marginalizing organized labour and frustrating democratic control.  I explore how the contemporary crisis of social inequality, political corruption and racist authoritarian government long predates Trump, first emerging after Reconstruction in the Kleptocracy of the Gilded Age, receding somewhat under Roosevelt's leadership and with the Bretton Woods consensus, only to re-emerge with the Reagan revolution and the political triumph of the racist reaction to the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements, and the radicalism of the 1960s.  On the foreign policy side, the resurgent power of the oligarchy within the country and the brutal repression of the poor and marginalization of labour and the voices of the black radical tradition, symbolized by the ruins of Detroit and the South Bronx, would be matched by the consolidation of the policies of the so-called Washington Consensus.  This policy approach, enforced by the IMF, World Bank, and American military force and paramilitary violence, is often sold as Globalization, critiqued as Neo-liberalism, but might more accurately be described as a return to racist colonialism of the filibusters, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson.  The talk, which is intended to engage non-academic audiences and avoid jargon and theory, ought to be read in conjunction with Richard Iton's Solidarity Blues, and WIlkinson and Pickett's The Spirit Level.

The Scopes “Monkey Trials” was nothing more than a publicity stunt. The beneficiary of this stunt was the international eugenics movement. Some of the influential figures behind the impetus remain well known.  What is not common knowledge is their ties to the eugenics lobby, and, by extension, the explicitly white supremacist views woven into the passages of the book at the center of the controversy.  More to the point, it is incredible that this aspect of this famous trial has not been delved into much. Consider the implications. Several generations of America’s youth were taught the concepts Nazi Germany’s Hitler Youth were schooled in.
RESEARCH EXCERPT FROM THE EUGENICS ANTHOLOGY: www.EugenicsAnthology.com

In both its historical Progressive Era roots and its contemporary manifestations, U.S. urban progressivism has evinced a contradictory tendency toward promoting the interests of capital and property while ostensibly protecting labor and tenants, thus producing policies that undermine its central claims. This article interrogates past and present appeals to urban progressive politics, particularly around housing and planning, and offers an in-depth case study of one of the most highly touted examples of the new urban progressivism: New York City’s recently adopted Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program. This case serves to identify the ways in which progressive rhetoric can disguise neoliberal policies. The article concludes with a discussion of legally viable housing policy alternatives that would challenge inequalities without producing gentrification. Given neoprogressivism’s ideological slipperiness, it is crucial for analysts, policymakers, and social movement actors to look beyond rhetorical claims to “progressive” politics and ask the questions: progress for whom, toward what?

THE ACCOUNT OF HISTORY is the theory of the present: How did we get here; and what tasks remain from the past-that however appear to be "new" today? As Adorno put it, "the new is the old in distress." This is true of capitalism and its crisis now. The present crisis is a crisis of the world system of capitalism that emerged in the 20th century, a crisis of the capitalist world created by the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century.

Donald Worster’s A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir is a magisterial biography. It is the place to begin
for understanding John Muir (1838-1914), the Scottish immigrant and popular U.S. Gilded Age and
Progressive Era naturalist most famous as the self-appointed spokesperson for Yosemite Valley, the founder of
the Sierra Club, and the most outspoken opponent of the damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley by the City of San
Francisco. Worster explores Muir’s tensions and contradictions. He also astutely analyzes Muir’s religiouslyinflected
“passion for nature.” He clarifies that Muir was not a neo-Transcendentalist, let alone a Buddhist, but
rather an evangelist for nature (creation) who never fully left behind the biblicist, anti-creedal, and antiinstitutional
sensibilities of the Campbellite Protestantism of his father.

During the early decades of the twentieth-century, the social sciences movement influenced Progressive Era reform initiatives, including the professionalization of social work, nursing, domestic science education, and urban sanitation. Predominantly led by female progressive reformers, these fields represented the "urban housekeeping" movement that was grounded in proto-feminism and maternalism. This paper uses the two largest Mormon denominations—the Utah-based LDS and the Midwestern RLDS churches—as case studies for the influence of the "urban housekeeping" movement on organized female societies within religious organizations, examining the growth and decline of female participation in national social welfare reforms from 1900 through 1930.

To honor the late Progressive Era historian Dr. Elisabeth Israels Perry (1939-2018), I wrote this article for the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era's academic blog.  It explores the similarities in Perry's experience writing her grandmother's biography, BELLE MOSKOWITZ: FEMININE POLITICS IN THE AGE OF ALFRED E. SMITH, to my own writing experience of my grandmother's biography, entitled "Memories: Writing the Life of Mayme Williams Carney."

See online at: https://www.shgape.org/writing-a-womans-life-a-personal-journey/

From 1915 to1925 the desire to control urban space and support big business in Atlanta erupted in a prolonged struggle between independent Jitney operators and the city’s streetcar system. Jitneys were multiple passenger vehicle used for sight to sight transport. Carving a niche apart from traditional transportation options, Jitneys operated without fixed routes hunting for fares all over the city. While an innovative new addition to the urban landscape was usually welcomed, Jitneys found themselves the focal point of bitter complaint from municipal streetcar franchises.

Mark Twain only wrote one work of collaborative fiction, The Gilded Age, a title that has come to characterize American excess between roughly the 1870s and the 1900s.1 His lesser-known co-author was the editor and publisher Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900), a man who later became a Vice President of the American Branch of the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF). Through such prominent connections, Britain’s EEF was zealously promoted and its subscriber base swelled. By the beginning of the twentieth century it could even count among its numbers the President of the United States himself. This intense interest coincided with the beginning of an expansion in the American museum sector, and out of all the countries that participated in Britain’s finds distribution network, it was the USA that became the most earnest competitor for a share of the finest discoveries. The result was that an estimated 60 institutions across 23 US states received Egyptian antiquities through British organizations between 1880 and the early 1920s.

In this paper I argue that the increase in the size of the Federal Government in the early twentieth century came about by a combination of a desire by the American public for reform and a perception that the Federal Government was the best agent for this reform.

The Wiawaka Holiday House on Lake George, New York is among the oldest continuously operating women’s holiday retreats in the United States. The Holiday House was founded on the grounds of a failing resort hotel at the turn of the twentieth century by wealthy women largely from industrial families to provide factory “girls” opportunities for healthful vacations in the countryside. Before the Holiday House was established, the property was the site of two resort hotels; their histories, spanning much of the nineteenth century, reflect the rise and transformations in the Adirondack resort hotel business. Presented in the early stages of doctoral research, this paper describes the current state of history and historical archaeology at the property and explores avenues of research related to the meanings and uses of leisure time in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as questions of gender, class, power, and labor.

“Evangelicalism Before the Fall” reveals the surprising and largely forgotten world of the premillennialist wing of late Victorian Evangelicalism through a close reading of its leading paper, The Christian Herald and Signs of Our Times. Organized around five thematic soundings (“worldly affairs”; “great questions”; “self and other”; “meeting modernity”; and “Evangelical culture”), the paper shows that premillennialism comported easily with socially elite status, liberal instincts, and irenic habits of mind not commonly associated with those holding similar beliefs in the decades after. Although the primary goal of the article is to recover an overlooked moment in Evangelical history, it secondarily contributes to a historiographical debate in the field of Fundamentalism studies, where revisionists have challenged the “fall” narrative of an earlier cohort of scholars, such as George Marsden and Joel Carpenter, who documented a decline in social standing and influence for the movement relative to the late nineteenth century. The article lends support to the fall narrative, properly understood as a change in social and cultural status

Two women who have not been prominently featured in women's history neither fit standard narratives nor are readily intelligible. Progressive era intellectuals often held opinions that we would now regard as contradictory, but these two are exceptionally difficult to place in the normal frame. Eastman was a great organizer; Gildersleeve, long term Dean of Barnard, was a great promoter of women's causes, within a framework of women's organization, but also a major player in international affairs, serving as one of the representative to the founding of the UN and  as an activist against the foundation of the state of Israel. Their context is discussed and explained. But the mystery remains.

At the turn of the twentieth century, Abraham Lincoln continued to influence events as an idea. Despite his biology’s end over thirty years earlier, Lincoln’s life was far from concluded; Progressive Era Americans remembered him actively, building monuments, writing biographies, and giving speeches. And by thinking about Lincoln, the Progressives reflected on America’s present condition. Representing the promise of national unity, Lincoln served as a unifying force for the Progressives, someone accessible to Americans of all backgrounds. The conflicting elements in Lincoln’s life—the tension between his early poverty and later fame—made his memory accessible for populists and centralized industrial capitalists alike. Regardless of their particular reform positions, the Progressives united in claiming Lincoln.
Indeed, Lincoln’s memory reveals that, despite its complexity, Progressivism remains a useful category for understanding America at the turn of the twentieth century. A hundred years after Lincoln’s birth, on February 12, 1909, over 10,000 Americans gathered in rural Kentucky for a common purpose. The Lincoln Birthplace Memorial cornerstone laying ceremony represented years of collaboration that involved unlikely accomplices. Drawing on the monetary contributions of thousands of people and the planning capacities of an advisory board comprised of prominent and politically divergent individuals, the Lincoln Birthplace Memorial demonstrates Progressives’ ability to find common ground. Placing a reconstruction of Lincoln’s log birth cabin inside of a neoclassical granite temple, the memorial demonstrated the connection between Lincoln and the Progressive Era’s conflicts. With the cabin gesturing to populism and the monument encapsulating industrial capitalism, the rural Kentucky shrine showed the Progressives’ tensions coexisting for single purpose.
Despite its complexity, Progressivism could cohere. Important differences of opinion certainly existed, but at the turn of the twentieth century, Americans at least agreed about the some of the problems they wanted to solve. Determining the self’s relationship to society occupied Progressives of all backgrounds. The socialist writers Edward Bellamy and William Dean Howells confronted the self in their respective novels Looking Backward and The Altrurian Romances. W. E. B. DuBois and John D. Rockefeller thought about the same issue in magazine articles, novels, and autobiographies. While the socialists favored the individual’s subordination to common concerns and the so called “elitists” believed that allowing the best and brightest to achieve their full selfhood would help society, everyone recognized a similar tension.
Lincoln’s memory helped the Progressives understand how seemingly incompatible visions could coexist in a single nation. The sixteenth president’s ability to simultaneously express both populist and national capitalist sensibilities in his life prefigured what Progressive Era Americans hoped would become national solidarity. At the turn of the twentieth century, Lincoln’s memory captured a generation’s concerns about their country.