In the presidential campaign of 2004, George W. Bush's advisor Karl Rove repeated to journalists his long-standing explanation of why he admires William McKinley and expects Bush to reproduce what Rove regards as McKinley's successes. In 2003, Kevin Phillips, a Bush critic, wrote a book explaining how much he also admires McKinley. Eric Schlosser, a muck-raking journalist, saw his play Americans debut in London in the fall of 2003 to a theater full of Britons drawn to a play about the assassination of McKinley. Schlosser explains his interest in McKinley by invoking William Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It isn't even past.” By saying so he raises anew the old question of how much our interest in present events ought to inflect our study of the past, but he also raises a question of peculiar interest to historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. The McKinley of Rove, Phillips, and Schlosser—the McKinley whom Rove wants the President to emulate—may sound dimly familiar to us. But does the work of professional historians sustain this gloss on current affairs?

Children were a special concern of women reformers in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Assembling in federations and associations, women were, as Mary Odem has written, “especially active in efforts that aimed to protect women, children, and the home from the harmful effects of rapid urban growth and industrial capitalism.” Poor children were at risk due to industrial accidents, epidemics, and the stress and exhaustion of simply surviving in crowded tenements and polluted cities. Daphne Spain has suggested that women “saved the city” by starting political coalitions, improving neighborhood environments, and fighting for a wide range of protective legislation. Among those reforms was the nationwide movement to establish medical services for children. New pediatric wards and children's hospitals were intended to be places of comfort and cure as well as moral and spiritual education for the “little sufferers” and their parents.

The decades surrounding the opening of the twentieth century saw one of the most significant shifts in the character of American public life. A political order dominated by decentralized parties and a limited state gave way to one defined by interest group activism, weaker parties, and more vigorous government. Scholars argue over the degree and extent of these changes, but few quarrel with the claim that public life looked substantially different by the end of the Progressive Era. Americans accepted interest group pluralism in principle and in practice by the 1920s, and the ideal of a politics devoted to an undifferentiated common good lost much of its persuasive power.

In 1968 Outdoor Life ran a retrospective piece that examined the turn-of-the-century origins of this popular sportsmen's magazine. In the article, editor William Rae noted, with some dismay, that two out of the first three stories in the December 1905 issue featured women hunters, including the tale of a “tireless Diana” who left her corset at home in order to take to the fields. “One wonders,” Rae commented dryly, “whether men really were men in those days, as we have been led to believe.” Clearly, Rae found the spectacle of sport hunting women unusual, and he assumed that their presence in the pages of a hunting periodical called into question the masculinity of earlier sportsmen. The connection that Rae and Outdoor Life readers made in 1968 between hunting and masculinity remains a commonplace. As feminist scholar Mary Zeiss Stange argues, hunting “might be, in the popular mind, the most male-identified cultural pursuit.”

Armed with volumes of Greek and Latin classics, James Loeb waged a gentleman's war. He took aim at what the modern world prized and with the ammunition of antiquity he sought to defeat it. Specifically, in 1912, he inaugurated the publication of his eponymous classical library of ancient texts and facing-page English translations. The Loeb Classical Library, numbering in the hundreds of volumes, collected into one series all the important works and many obscure texts from antiquity. With the same popularizing instinct that guided other purveyors of middlebrow culture, Loeb aimed to connect a general audience with its classical heritage. With his set of compact green and red volumes whose publication he funded, Loeb saw himself as a warrior in the centuries-long battle between the ancients and the moderns.

“Actresses as a rule know no more about making themselves beautiful than does the average woman; neither are they naturally more beautiful,” wrote actress Margaret Illington Banes in a 1912 article entitled “The Mad Search for Beauty.” “The truth of the matter is,” she continued, “that no actress—or any woman—can impart the secrets of beauty to another, any more than the rich man can impart the secrets of business success to some other man.” Disturbed by recent trends in the theatrical profession that required actresses to present themselves as “beauty specialists,” Banes sought to expose the constructed nature of their on- and offstage performances. Stage stars captivated audiences because they had numerous opportunities to appear onstage dressed in the height of style; “under the same circumstances,” she concluded, most women “would look quite as well.”

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

Many fans and scholars of newspaper comics have observed that an excellent way to chart a social history of American culture in the twentieth century is to look at the mainstream comic strip page. This may be especially true of the first half of the twentieth century when comic strips were avidly followed by readers from almost all age, class, and ethnic demographics. Because of this breadth of popularity, the comics page was a fairly accurate reflector (and occasionally, shaper) of fashions, fads, humor, politics, and racial prejudices. Early cartoonists' ability to place their fingers on the American pulse can largely be attributed to the industry's eagerness to please readers: as a lowbrow entertainment that targeted broad audiences through street corner sales, and later, national syndication, it tried to anticipate the characters, comedy, and ideological content that would attract and retain devoted readers. A few iconoclastic cartoonists such as Al Capp (Li'l Abner) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat) challenged readers with topical satire or appealed to niche audiences with quirky humor and aesthetics; but even the most innovative work in the medium relied on a sort of call and response between core readers, syndicates, editors, and artists—a back and forth that insured that the cartoonist's work resonated with, or spoke for, its fans.

Peter Alexander Speek arrived in the United States in the fall of 1908 at the age of 35, “having in my pocket only 4c and knowing hardly more English words.” A leader of revolutionary activities against Russian rule in his native Estonia, Speek came to the U.S. a committed socialist intent on developing worker awareness and leading the class struggle. After two years in New York, Speek traveled to the West Coast, entered the graduate program i n economics at the University of Wisconsin, and worked two years as an investigator for the United States Commission on Industrial Relations (CIR). During his time with the CIR, Speek traveled widely across the United States, “visiting labor camps, cheap city lodging houses, gatherings of hoboes and tramps in so-called ‘jungles’, interviewing employers and various public agencies.” Speek wrote dozens of reports during these investigations that served as the foundation for official CIR policy recommendations and for a series of popular press articles on current migratory conditions. In doing this work, Speek became a recognized authority on migratory labor issues. Reference to Speek's reports can be found in studies of early-twentieth-century migratory labor conditions, but a specific evaluation of Speek and of his contributions has not been written. Speek's work for the CIR is of interest because of its subject matter and its comprehensive coverage. Speek's work is also of interest because it was during this period that Speek rejected his revolutionary socialism and became a structural reformer, accepting the basic U.S. economic and political system and working to improve the details of its institutions.

In 1903, Alan Dale, the theater critic for the New York American and Journal, when contemplating the state of the American stage, came to the conclusion that “the only national theatre I can find, after severe cogitation, is that beautiful, flip, and classic commodity known as musical comedy.” Dale pointed out that musical comedy's exorbitant popularity was a recent development, emerging only in the previous five or ten years, and that his anointing of the form as the national theater would not sit well with more serious-minded devotees of drama. “Well read gentlemen with heavy minds,” wrote Dale, would prefer different sorts of productions, plays that “mere commercial managers don't want to stage and mere amusement seekers don't want to see.” Seeking an improbable bridge over this cultural divide, Dale suggested that “[Henrik] Ibsen might air his neat little views on heredity in happy verse set to music…[His] favorite subject of maggots on the brain” could feature a “chorus of pretty girls disguised as maggots.”

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