Racism, Immigrants, and Political Reform

In his presidential address to the Organization of American Historians, David Montgomery challenges the overarching narrative that presents United States history as simply the progressive fulfillment of democratic ideals. Such a view obscures the popular struggles that have fallen short of their participants’ goals and the popular achievements that have been reversed. Montgomery warns that celebrating past victories of democracy has too often been a way to undercut attempts to expand human rights. The necessary context of American history is the worldwide migrations of free and unfree people. Conflicts over the purposes and objectives of government have been inseparable from the consequent controversies over who is, or can be, an American. (pp. 1253–74) Read online >

Evolution For John Doe: Pictures, the Public, and the Scopes Trial Debate

Examining the debates over evolution that culminated in the Scopes trial in 1925, Constance Areson Clark directs us from the contest of words to the contest of images. Scientists use images, she argues, not only to communicate among themselves and with the public, but also to shape their ideas. Such images permeate our culture, but they may not mean the same thing to outsiders as to scientists. In the essay that won the Louis Pelzer Award for 2000, Clark analyzes visual depictions of evolutionary ideas in the textbooks, magazines, popular books, and museums of the early twentieth century. Those images did more than oversimplify scientists’ thinking. By presenting evolution as a tidy, one-directional progress toward humans, they fed racist and eugenicist convictions of the superiority of some humans to others. (pp. 1275–1303) Read online >

For suggestions on how to use Clark’s article in the United States history survey course, see “Teaching the JAH” Web site supplement.

The United States and “Psychological Warfare” in Italy, 1948–1955

Mario Del Pero takes us inside American covert efforts to undermine Italian Communism between 1948 and 1955, the height of the Cold War in Italy. In the essay that won the David Thelen Prize for 2000, Del Pero shows how the United States shifted its containment strategy from promoting economic development in the late 1940s to purging Communists from Italian politics and labor after 1953. But American policy was not effective as Italy’s leaders sought to contain American pressures. Such parties as the Christian Democrats battled Communists at the polls but refused to carry out American strategies if they compromised Italy’s constitution. Anticommunism was not enough to produce an automatic convergence of interests between the Italian and United States governments. (pp. 1304–34) Read online >

Federal Power and Southern Resistance during World War I

World War I dramatically increased the presence of the federal government in the lives of ordinary southerners. In our round table, “Federal Power and Southern Resistance during World War I,” three historians examine how wartime conscription and social insurance brought federal policy directly into the communities and households of southerners, both unsettling and reinforcing relationships of class, race, and gender.

The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917–1918: Class, Race, and Conscription in the Rural South

Most histories of World War I have located draft resistance in immigrant and socialist communities in the Northeast and Midwest. Jeanette Keith argues that the nation’s largest center of draft resistance was the rural South. Rural southern whites protested conscription through conventional means until shut down by the federal government’s wartime sedition laws. Resistance stiffened as rural whites and blacks faced draft boards operating under federal rules that penalized the poor. Although members of both races protested, resistance reflected the racial construction of southern society, with whites more likely to use violence than blacks. This history of resistance contradicts long-held assumptions of popular support for the war. (pp. 1335–61) Read online >

War, Region, and Social Welfare: Federal Aid to Servicemen’s Dependents in the South, 1917–1921

Cash payments for dependents of World War I soldiers, an unprecedented national welfare program, were intended to reinforce conventional notions of women’s work and husbands’ power over wives. Yet, by creating an entitlement and by bringing women into direct contact with the state, the payments undermined separate gender spheres and male authority, most dramatically in the American South. The system allowed women to claim half of their husbands’ pay—even against their husbands’ will—and demonstrated how the federal government might promote the welfare of families in a region with few welfare services. More, the payments permitted African American women to escape field labor and domestic service—perhaps contributing to the later exclusion of agricultural and domestic laborers from Social Security. K. Walter Hickel’s account of the program enriches our understanding of Progressive reform, the origins of the New Deal, federalism, and women’s history. (pp. 1362–1) Read online >

Federal Power, Southern Power: A Long View, 1860–1940

Jacqueline Jones places the southern home front during World War I in the context of the Civil War and the New Deal. Commenting on the essays by Keith and Hickel, Jones highlights the persistent efforts of local authorities to circumvent federal authority and the enduring tensions between southerners along racial and class lines. Throughout these articles can be heard the echoes of a turbulent Confederate history, even as both foreshadow the social welfare debates of the 1930s. (pp. 1392–96) Read online >

The Liberal Tradition in America: A German View

Has liberalism defined American political culture? Is American history exceptional? For three decades historians of the United States have generally said no to both questions. Klaus J. Hansen respectfully reviews a book by the German scholar Hans Vorländer that says yes. Hansen agrees that liberalism, though tempered by religion and republicanism, has dominated American political thinking. To elucidate Vorländer’s contrarian stance, Hansen highlights a juxtaposition implicit in Vorländer’s work: the Sonderweg, the special path taken by Germany as an industrial society that eschewed liberal democracy, versus the exceptionalism of the United States as an industrial society that established liberal hegemony. Hansen suggests that Vorländer’s study shows the value of an outsider’s perspective. (pp. 1397–1408) Read online >

• “Teaching the American History Survey at the Opening of the Twenty-First Century: A Round Table Discussion” (pp. 1409–41) Read online >
• The syllabi for the United States history survey course developed by several participants in the Textbooks and Teaching round table are available at http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/textbooks/2001/.