On June 22, 1918, an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) named Walker Smith was arrested at his home in Seattle. Two Scottish sisters, Janet and Margaret Roy, were arrested with him, and unlike Smith and the many others he consorted with, they were not American citizens. As foreigners, the sisters’ experience in the American legal system, the newspaper coverage devoted to them, and their attempts to thwart the immigration laws that targeted them provide an example of how American immigration law and practice sought to ideologically sort and control new arrivals to the United States.
A Progressive Statesman Confronts Modern Art
The Progressive Era (ca. 1900-1920) was a time of great change in American life. Urbanization and industrialization increased, immigration grew, progressive reformers introduced new forms of government regulation, and new types of literature and art entered the scene. The changes delighted some Americans but confounded and upset others. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was a change-maker but also someone who struggled to understand and accept some of the changes of the era. Modern art, which debuted in the new century, was one of those changes.
“Faces of the First Red Scare”: Documenting Red Scare Deportees
Below is an interview with Dr. Kenyon Zimmer, a historian of transnational radicalism. Recently, as I was editing a piece for our blog, I stumbled across his personal website where he has published a comprehensive digital archive of Red Scare deportees. I thought our readers could benefit from this resource, both for their own research and for the classroom. It is also a wonderful example of a digital history project, and Zimmer gives us insight into the surprising responses he’s had to it.
High Cost of Living? Blame the President.
The federal government’s regulatory involvement in the economy has grown greatly since the 1910s. The incongruities of fiscal politics, though, resembled those of today. A Democratic administration tolerated massive borrowing—to meet wartime needs then and a pandemic emergency recently—while Republicans condemned as inflationary actions they might well have taken themselves (and did during Trump’s administration). Unlike in Wilson’s era, today’s Federal Reserve Board bears much of the responsibility for curbing inflation. Yet politically, the president’s administration still faces most of the criticism when consumer prices have risen sharply. Then and now, the budgetary pressures of competing policy needs and the sheer difficulty of lowering prices virtually guarantee voter discontent.
Understanding Comstock Through Primary Sources
In addition to reading and assigning the posts in this blog series, instructors may want to bring a discussion of Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws into their classes through primary sources. This piece introduces a few readily accessible and rich options.
Robert W. McAfee: The Comstock of Chicago
By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly every state had enacted or revised some sort of anti-obscenity statute, and eight of the country’s ten largest cities had an anti-vice society. This blog post spotlights one understudied arm of the apparatus: Robert W. McAfee. Although McAfee never rivaled Comstock’s prominence in the press and in public imagination, he was instrumental to the expansion and daily operation of the Comstock regime across stretches of the Midwest, Upper South, and Great Plains.
Abortion, Contraception, and the Comstock Law’s Original Medical Exemption, 1873-1936
The Comstock Act of 1873 was not meant to be, nor did it ever function as, a total abortion ban. This fact is important to emphasize in our current political moment because those who want to revive the statute have argued that the Comstock Act is an existing (if dormant) law that already bans abortion on a federal level. They have also argued that the law completely outlawed abortion in the past. The statute’s legislative and enforcement history, however, tells a different story. It was first and foremost a law about obscenity and sexual purity.
Anthony Comstock and the Comstock Laws: A JGAPE Forum Preview
This blog series aims to provide vital historical context for those seeking to understand the modern revival of Anthony Comstock and his namesake law. The Comstock Act has never been repealed and remains part of Sections 1461 and 1462 in the United States Code, although many Americans have little to no idea about the details of this law, if they have even heard of it. Anthony Comstock himself seems like an odd joke today: a repressed, puritanical, anti-sex reformer and a relic of a bygone past. And yet, because the act has been revived as a strategy for limiting access to reproductive healthcare, Comstock is no joke.
New Light on the Progressive Movement
The progressive period, much like our own times, was an era of tension, change, and new ideas and policies replacing old ones. Historians’ attention has focused mostly on progressivism at the national level. Federal-level reform naturally gets highlighted due to its nationwide impact, but the states often set the pace and were the proving ground and prototypes for regulation later enacted at Washington.
Excavating the Colonial War on D.C. Alleys in the Making of Imperial Washington
Simultaneously a symbol for the nation and a longtime major Black city without political representation, Washington, D.C., has appeared to many—in the words of blues poet Gil Scott-Heron—as “a ball of contradictions” between affluent white political elites “who come and go” and the predominantly Black poor and working-class “who’ve got to stay.” Perhaps nowhere is this entanglement better illustrated than the McMillan Plan’s Progressive Era redesign of “Imperial Washington” made possible by the racialized slum clearance of the Metropolitan Police Department’s “war on alleys” at the turn of the twentieth century.
New York Police Commissioner Arthur Woods, “Progressive Policing,” and the Wiretapping Scandal of 1916
New York City’s mayoral election of 1913 swept a young reformer, John Purroy Mitchel, into office as the candidate of the Fusion Party. His police commissioner, Arthur H. Woods, pledged to solve the crime problem and quell public disturbances by instituting a series of police reforms based on the progressive principles of “scientific management.” However, one of these initiatives—use of a police wiretapping unit for the clandestine gathering of information—led to a public scandal and contributed to the downfall of the reform movement in New York City.
Reading Red Emma: A Critique of Liberal Democracy in America
Between contested elections and global crises, seemingly every political issue today is seen as a “threat to our democracy.” But despite the general consensus on the desirability of democracy in the West, this system of the people and by the people has not been without its detractors. A century ago, the Russian-born anarchist, Emma Goldman (1869-1940), was the embodiment of a threat to American democracy. Her motto was “Death to Tyranny! Vive l’Anarchie!” As an anarchist, Goldman was against all forms of political authority, and for this she drew the ire not only of the American government, but of her native Russia as well.