These Truths

by Jill Lepore

  43.Quoted in Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 18.

  44.Mary E. Lease, speech to the National Council of Women of the United States, Washington, DC, February 24, 1891.

  45.See Paula Baker, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 620–47; and Michael McGerr, “Political Style and Women’s Power, 1830–1930,” JAH 77 (1990): 864–85.

  46.Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 334–36.

  47.Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 111. And, on the sweep of this era, see Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), especially chs. 2, 3, and 4; Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, especially chs. 7, 8, and 9; and William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1992), especially chs. 2, 3, and 5.

  48.Quoted in Judith Freeman Clark, The Gilded Age (New York: Facts On File, 2006), 101.

  49.Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 22–23.

  50.Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 318–24.

  51.Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 30.

  52.“Farmers’ Declaration of Independence,” Pacific Rural Press [San Francisco], August 30, 1873.

  53.Quoted in Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 25.

  54.Quoted in Jefferson Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal & the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press/Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America, 2016), 42.

  55.Quoted in Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 264.

  56.Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 60.

  57.Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 377–87.

  58.United States, Department of the Interior, Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior (Washington, DC, 1883), 732.

  59.Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 357–58; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 72.

  60.Conkling’s chicanery is fully recounted in Adam Winkler, We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights (New York: Liveright, 2017).

  61.Ibid.

  62.Ibid.

  63.Quoted in Cowie, The Great Exception, 37.

  64.Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 165. Orr’s language was both commonplace and consequential: as I argue in The Secret History of Wonder Woman (New York: Knopf, 2014), the nineteenth-century notion of female superiority served as an inspiration for the comic book superhero Wonder Woman, created in 1941.

  65.Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 31–32.

  66.Freeman, A Room at a Time, 34–35; Frances Willard, My Happy Half-Century: The Autobiography of an American Woman (London: Ward, Lock, and Bowden, 1894), 312.

  67.Sarah E. V. Emery, Seven Financial Conspiracies Which Have Enslaved the American People (Lansing, MI: Robert Smith and Co., 1888), 8. And see Russell B. Nye, “Sarah Elizabeth Van de Vort Emery,” in Notable American Women, 1607–1950, ed. Edward T. James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 3:582–83.

  68.Quoted in Haynes, President-Making in the Gilded Age, 78.

  69.Gustafson, Women and the Republican Party, 59; Freeman, We Will be Heard, 86–87; Gustafson et al., We Have Come to Stay, 6–7.

  70.On George’s life, see Edward J. Rose, Henry George (New York: Twayne, 1968), and David Montgomery, “Henry George,” American National Biography Online.

  71.Henry George, “What the Railroad Will Bring Us,” in Henry George: Collected Journalistic Writings, ed. Kenneth C. Wenzer, 4 vols. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharp, 2003), 1:15–26; Rose, Henry George, 54.

  72.Rose, Henry George, 40.

  73.Henry George, “Money in Elections,” North American Review 136 (March 1883): 211.

  74.Roy G. Saltman, The History and Politics of Voting Technology: In Quest of Integrity and Public Confidence (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 84, 91–92.

  75.Henry George, “Bribery in Elections,” Overland Monthly 7 (December 1871): 497–504.

  76.Rose, Henry George, 121; Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 53.

  77.Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 62, 60, 201.

  78.Mary E. Lease, The Problem of Civilization Solved (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1895). And see Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 131–33.

  79.Quoted in John Henry Wigmore, The Australian Ballot System (Boston: C. C. Soule, 1889), 23–24; Lionel E. Fredman, The Australian Ballot: The Story of an American Reform (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University, 1968), ix.

  80.Fredman, The Australian Ballot, 42–43.

  81.Herbert J. Bass, ‘I Am a Democrat’: The Political Career of David Bennett Hill (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1961), 149; New York Herald, January 17, February 9, 1890 and NYT, March 4, 29, 1890.

  82.Fredman, The Australian Ballot, 53–55; Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 79; John Crowley, “Uses and Abuses of the Secret Ballot in the American Age of Reform,” in Romain Bertrand, Jean-Louis Briquet, and Peter Pels, eds., Cultures of Voting: The Hidden History of the Secret Ballot (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2007), 59.

  83.Quoted in Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 (New York: Knopf, 2007), 200.

  84.Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York: Knopf, 2006), 7–20.

  85.Quoted in Kazin, A Godly Hero, 48–49.

  86.Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 76–77.

  87.Russell B. Nye, “Sarah Elizabeth Van de Vort Emery,” in Notable American Women, 1607–1950, edited by Edward T. James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 3:582–83.

  88.Quoted in Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 81.

  89.Donnelly’s speech appears in Scott J. Hammond et al., Classics of American Political and Constitutional Thought (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub., 2007), 229.

  90.National People’s Party Platform, Omaha, Nebraska, July 4, 1892.

  91.Quoted in Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 93, 115.

  92.Quoted in Robert C. McMath Jr., American Populism: A Social History, 1877–1898 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 181.

  93.Quoted in Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 121.

  94.William Jennings Bryan, “An Income Tax,” 1894, in Speeches of William Jennings Bryan, 2 vols. (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1909), 2:178.

  95.Kazin, A Godly Hero, 51; Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan and Trust Company, 57 U.S. 429 (1895).

  96.Broadly, see Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press/Ideas in Context, 1991); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

  97.A. Scott Berg, Wilson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2013), 107. Cooper writes: “He really had only one subject, which he studied with quiet obsessiveness: How does power really work?” See John Milton Cooper Jr., ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War and Peace (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 17.

  98.Quoted in Daly, Covering America, 155.

  99.Ibid., 112–16, 125–27.

  100.Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 110.

  101.Julius Chambers, News Hunting on Three Continents (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921), 7. Schudson, Origins of the Ideal of Objectivity, 170–80.

  102.“Expressions of Regret,” NYT, October 30, 1897.

  103.1896 Democratic Party Platform.

  104.William Jennings Bryan and Robert W. Cherny, The Cross of Gold: Speech Delivered before the National Democratic Convention at Chicago, July 9, 1896 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

  105.“Repudiation Has Won,” NYT, July 10, 1896.

  106.Quoted in Kazin, A Godly Hero, 63–65.

  107.Quoted in Richard Franklin Bensel, Passion and Pr
eferences: William Jennings Byran and the 1896 Democratic National Convention (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 304; Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 178–79.

  108.Kazin, A Godly Hero, 66–77.

  109.Orr, “Mary Elizabeth Lease,” 198, 190, 200–2.

  110.“Brief History of the AHA,” https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/brief-history-of-the-aha, accessed June 24, 2017.

  111.Max Weber and C. Wright Mills, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Routledge, 2009), 51.

  112.Quoted in Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 34.

  113.Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 115.

  114.Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Wisconsin, 1893).

  115.Isaacson, The Innovators, 35–36. And see Geoffrey D. Austrian, Herman Hollerith: Forgotten Giant of Information Processing (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

  116.Turner, The Significance of the Frontier.

  117.Anna R. Paddon and Sally Turner, “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Illinois Historical Journal 88 (1995): 19–36.

  118.Frederick Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored Man Is Not in the Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Privately printed, 1893), introduction.

  119.Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in American History: From Colonial Times through the Nineteenth Century, 4 vols. (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson Pub., 1990), 3:336.

  120.On Wells’s life, see Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely. For her writings, see Ida B. Wells-Barnett, The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-lynching Crusader, ed. Mia Bay and Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin Books, 2014). Frederick Douglass, Letter, in Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: The New Age, 1891), 51.

  121.Douglass, The Reason Why the Colored Man Is Not in the Columbian Exposition, introduction.

  122.Paddon and Turner, “African Americans and the World’s Columbian Exposition.”

  123.Quoted in William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 371.

  124.Frederick Douglass, “The Blessings of Liberty and Education,” Manassas, Virginia, September 3, 1894, in Frederick Douglass Papers, 5:629.

  125.“Death of Fred Douglass,” NYT, February 21, 1895.

  126.“Tributes of Two Races,” NYT, February 26, 1895.

  127.“The Duty of the Bar to Uphold the Constitutional Guarantees of Contracts and Private Property,” American Law Review 26 (1892): 674.

  128.Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 57 (1896).

  129.W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. McClurg, 1903), 3.

  Ten: EFFICIENCY AND THE MASSES

  1.Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1999), 282, xv, 280, 175; on the House of Truth, see 120–23 and Brad Snyder, The House of Truth: A Washington Political Salon and the Foundations of American Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), especially ch. 5.

  2.Snyder, House of Truth, 3. On the Progressive urge, see Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

  3.See the OED. The quotation is from “Merchants Hold a Radio Luncheon,” NYT, March 18, 1927.

  4.Quoted in Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 27; “Candidate Watson’s Book,” Indianapolis News, July 27, 1896.

  5.Quoted in George McKenna, The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 242.

  6.For discussions of distinctions among these groups, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955); Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Glenda Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

  7.Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 154; Robert Post, Citizens Divided: Campaign Finance Reform and the Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 30; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 270.

  8.Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion: The Irony of It All, 1893–1919, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1:286, 362n10; Henry George, Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions, and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth, the Remedy (London: W. Reeves, 1884), 426; Clarence Darrow, The Story of My Life (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932), 52.

  9.Gladden is quoted in Gary J. Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 65.

  10.Degler, Out of Our Past, 346; FitzGerald, The Evangelicals, 65–69.

  11.Kazin, A Godly Hero, 124.

  12.Daly, Covering America, 132–38.

  13.Emilio Aguinaldo to the Philippine People, February 5, 1899, in Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, eds., The Philippines Reader: A History of Colonialism, Neocolonialism, Dictatorship, and Resistance (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 20–21; Bryan, “Will It Pay?,” New York Journal, January 15, 1899; Kazin, A Godly Hero, 91.

  14.Albert J. Beveridge, “In Support of an American Empire,” 56 Cong. Rec. 704–12 (January 9, 1900); Ben Tillman, 56 Cong. Rec. 836–37 (January 20, 1899).

  15.[Unsigned] black soldier to the Wisconsin Weekly Advocate, May 17, 1900; and Rienzi B. Lemus to the Richmond Planet, November 4, 1899, in Willard B. Gatewood Jr., ed., “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898–1902 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1987), 279–81, 246–47.

  16.C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955), 82; Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 26, 29, 31, 26–27, 37, 45–46, 40; Twain quoted in Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Knopf, 2002), 203; Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), 41–45.

  17.W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 11 (1898): 1. On the early history of surveys, see Robert Wuthnow, Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 8–9, and especially 15–43. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 226.

  18.Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely, 95; Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns, 10; Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois, 411.

  19.Theodore Roosevelt, “Address of President Roosevelt at the Laying of the Corner Stone of the Office Building of the House of Representatives” (“The Man with the Muck-Rake”), April 14, 1906; Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muck-Rake,” The Outlook, April 21, 1906.

  20.Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 241; Weinberg, Taking on the Trust, 227; Daly, Covering America, 148.

  21.Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 6; Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, 2 vols. (1902; New York: Macmillan, 1925), 1:vii, 37.

  22.Quoted in Kazin, A Godly Hero, 125.

  23.Berg, Wilson, 44, 49, 73, 78, 81, 103–5; Mark Benbow, “Wilson the Man,” in Ross A. Kennedy, ed., A Companion to Woodrow Wilson (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 9–37.

  24.Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 110–11; Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911), 56, 60, 69.

  25.Quoted in
Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, 203; Kazin, A Godly Hero, 105–6.

  26.Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace (New York: Doubleday, 2014), 41, 13, 36, 42, 266; Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (London: Picador, 1995), 4; Lynn Dumenil, The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 11; Kazin, A Godly Hero, 114.

  27.Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, 125, 207, 213–14; Kazin, A Godly Hero, 114.

  28.Quoted in Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt, 225.

  29.Robert Stanley, Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 180, table 5-1. Bryan’s speech is reproduced in Paolo E. Coletta, “The Election of 1908,” in Schlesinger, History of American Presidential Elections, 1789–1968, 3:2115. On his reception, see Kazin, A Godly Hero, 145–46.

  30.Quoted in Steven R. Weisman, The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson: How the Income Tax Transformed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 227.

  31.Stanley, Dimensions of Law, 211–12, table 5-5; “History of the 1040,” Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1994.

  32.Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 65, 156, 375.

  33.Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

  34.Shugerman, The People’s Courts, 173; 62 Cong. Rec. 472 (1912), appendix.

  35.On this point, especially, see Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, ch. 5.

  36.Irving Fisher, “The Need for Health Insurance,” American Labor Legislation Review 7 (1917): 9–23.

  37.Arthur J. Viseltear, “Compulsory Health Insurance in California, 1915–1918,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1969): 170–71; Odin W. Anderson, “Health Insurance in the United States, 1910–1920,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 5 (1950): 370–71; Ronald Numbers, “The Specter of Socialized Medicine: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance,” in Numbers, ed. Compulsory Health Insurance: The Continuing American Debate (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1982), 3–24.