2008 Presidential Address

All Politics Are Local: Another Look at the 1890s

Peter H. Argersinger
Although rarely considered by historians, legislative and congressional apportionments were among the most important, absorbing, and contentious political issues of the late nineteenth century. Local, state, and national party leaders struggled to shape apportionments and thereby secure disproportionate influence for the counties, districts, and states their followers controlled. Gerrymanders, in turn, not only distorted representation but often incited a furious opposition, which disrupted legislative bodies, transformed political campaigns, and ultimately produced unprecedented judicial intervention. In surveying these overlooked developments, this essay points to important questions that historians must hereafter address.

Alan Dawley (1943–2008): Memorial and Assessment

Alan Dawley: A Personal Remembrance

Ann Marie Nicolosi

The Scholarly Odyssey of an Activist Historian: Alan Dawley in Historiography

Ian Tyrrell

Editor’s Note: The journal requested these two essays to commemorate and assess the career of Alan Dawley, who died suddenly while on a study trip in Mexico in March 2008. First, Ann Marie Nicolosi, a colleague and former student, provides a personal remembrance. Then, editorial board member Ian Tyrrell, an authority on the intellectual history of United States history writing, explains why Dawley’s books and essays offer excellent examples of the intellectual concerns and development of his generation of United States historians.

Essays

Blaming Martin Irons: Leadership and Popular Protest in the 1886 Southwest Strike

Theresa A. Case
The story of the Great Southwest strike, a textbook example of the upheavals of 1886, has long been told as an epic battle between railway millionaire Jay Gould, national Knights of Labor head Terence Powderly, and Martin Irons, with many historians and contemporaries casting strike leader Irons as the epitome of impatient, romantic, and even deluded labor activism. District Assembly 101’s call to walk out on Gould’s southwestern system of roads was, arguably, strategically ill-advised. It vastly overestimated the Knights’ power in the wake of two victories against Gould in 1885 and certainly ignored the district’s lack of funds, lax support among skilled trainmen, and the terms of an historic agreement between the national Knights and Gould. A closer look at Irons’s life and leadership, however, reveals a more complicated explanation of the strike and takes into fuller account the experiences and perceptions of striking railroaders. This essay holds that events on the ground, combined with the heady context of the Great Upheaval, influenced Irons and his supporters’ decisions to strike, to expand the effort, and to defend it with violence. The ensuing attacks on Irons stemmed partly from his unstable personal history but largely from the broader social anxieties that the conflict had exposed.

Guarding the Switch: Cultivating Nationalism during the Pullman Strike

Troy Rondinone
The Pullman Strike of 1894 was a cataclysmic event for the nation. During its violent course, the print media provided an interpretive frame that portrayed the strike in large measure as an immigrant-inspired attack on American laws and democratic customs. Often characterizing the strikers as “foreigners” in the thrall of anarchist ideologies and a tyrannous labor chieftain, journalists painted a stark picture indeed. Employing framing theory, Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, and recent insights on the ethnic quality of nationalism, this essay argues that newspapers and other major print periodicals significantly contributed to the formation of nationalist attitudes at a time when many Americans were deeply worried over the direction in which the country was headed.

The Enigma of Meyer Lissner: Los Angeles’s Progressive Boss

Mark H. Stevens
Meyer Lissner was Los Angeles’s preeminent municipal political reformer between 1906 and 1913. Yet he was perhaps an enigmatic progressive. His life defied conformity and categorization to specific progressive norms regarding ethnicity, religion, upbringing, and social position. His gift for organization, combined with a keen political intelligence, enabled him to organize a formidable opposition to the Southern Pacific–dominated local political environment. Los Angeles’s municipal politics thereafter remained nonpartisan. His political skill won him the praise of his progressive supporters and the scorn of his critics as a “reform boss,” a charge with which they mercilessly pursued him throughout the remainder of his municipal career. Was Lissner a “reformer,” a “boss,” a combination of both, or neither? Do such categories matter, given the reality of Progressive Era urban politics and current trends in writing on the stereotyped struggle between the boss and the reformer?

Book Reviews

Lion in the White House: A Life of Theodore Roosevelt by Aida D. Donald / Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness by Joshua David Hawley

Reviewed by Edward P. Kohn

After the Gold Rush: Tarnished Dreams in the Sacramento Valley by David Vaught

Reviewed by Robert M. Senkewicz

Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876–1893 by Ben Railton

Reviewed by Kevin B. Sheets

The Body in the Reservoir: Murder and Sensationalism in the South by Michael Ayers Trotti

Reviewed by Christopher Waldrep

A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform by Laura M. Westhoff

Reviewed by Ruth Crocker


Index to Volume 7 (2008) Table of Contents