This April will mark the centennial of the United States’ entry into World War I. In an extension of his distinguished scholar address to SHGAPE members at the 2016 Organization of American Historians meeting, Manfred Berg offers a timely reconsideration of the consequences of that decision. Berg uses the tool of counterfactual history to explicate what U.S. history might have looked like had the country not become a belligerent party to the Great War. In some ways, he concludes, the American participation in the war mattered less than we might think: the other plausible scenarios for the war's course point to a similar role for the United States as the world's leading economic and financial center in the following decade. How consequential the war was for domestic events, Berg argues, is a more difficult question to answer, but he carefully charts the impact of the war on progressive economic regulations, civil liberties, electoral politics, women's suffrage, and the issues of civil rights for which recent student protests at Princeton University have so vigorously denounced Wilson. The essay is thus both a study of the war and a spirited defense of an intellectual exercise employed by generations of scholars, going back to Max Weber.
Robin Henry similarly views a well-known event of a century ago from a distinct vantage. The 1913–14 Colorado Coal Wars were a grim warning of the potential for yawning class divides to produce not only labor strife but also intense violence. Stung by the widespread public revulsion at his company's role in the violence, John D. Rockefeller Jr. vowed to rebuild the relationship between his family's company and its employees. Henry stresses the deeply gendered nature of Rockefeller's manifold efforts to foster loyalty, docility, and self-restraint among his employees—and to transform his own image. Other employers and agencies carried out similar initiatives, ensuring that for better or worse, Rockefeller left his mark in many contests over masculinity, workplace power, and the corporate world.
Jeffrey D. Broxmeyer likewise takes on the politics of capitalism in his article on the controversies over Tammany Hall banking in 1871. Tammany Hall, it turns out, was not merely a political institution, but one that used its considerable earnings from patronage to set itself up in the banking industry. Broxmeyer thus revives the concept of “political capitalism”—a category of analysis that scholars have mostly neglected since Gabriel Kolko's invocation of that label in his 1962 The Triumph of Conservatism.
Cody Dodge Ewert rounds out the articles with an essay on the politics of educational patriotism. Beginning with a mass celebration of half a million people in Brooklyn in 1892, he reveals the grand uses made by educational officials of the grand celebration of Columbus's initial voyage. Schools did not inevitably become the cornerstones of democracy and Americanization, Ewert argues; rather, it required constant effort and conscious planning to make education the centerpiece of the social order. Patriotism and progressivism mixed to lift up schooling in the eyes of both localities like Brooklyn and the nation as a whole.
War. Manly capitalism. Political (read “crony”?) capitalism. Patriotic history in the schools. As so often, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era curiously mirror our own.
