Morton Keller

Regulating a new society : public policy and social change in America, 1900-1933

* Preface * Introduction Institutions The Family and the State * The Matrix of Marriage * The Dilemmas of Divorce * Parent and Child Church and State, School and Society * Church and State * School and Society Issues Private Rights and Civil Liberties * The Interests of Personality * Civil Liberties and Social Change * The Passions of Politics and War Private Vices, Public Mores * Frailties of the Flesh * The Crusade against Drink * Jerusalem Lost Crime and Punishment * The Face of Crime * Criminal Justice Social Welfare * Comparative Perspectives * Poverty and Pensions * The Publics Health * The Condition of Labor Groups Immigrants and Aliens * Restriction * Aliens, Citizenship, and Race Blacks and Whites * Progressivism and Race * Racism and Normalcy Indians and Women * Assimilation * Suffrage * Abbreviations * Notes * Index * Modern Times: Images

Business History and Legal History

It may well be that the present will stand as a golden age in the historiography of American business and American law. Both fields have flourished – indeed, flowered – in recent years. Perhaps the best measure of this is the fact that the 1978 winners of the Bancroft Prize in American History were Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and Morton J. Horwitzs The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860 , each a notable work in its own right, each a summation of sorts of the recent evolution of its field of historical inquiry.

Anglo-American Politics, 1900–1930, in Anglo-American Perspective: A Case Study in Comparative History

At the turn of the twentieth century, a new reform movement rose to challenge the nations economic oligarchy. It drew its support from an expanding urban middle class andfrom influential intellectuals and publicists. The party that gave political voice to these interests was led by a popular leader notedfor his vague but alluring rhetoric. He made skillful use of the press and of his party machinery. He and his followers sought to control large economic interests (an important railroad regulation law was passed in 1907) and to democratize the machinery of government (a major electoral reform law was passed in 1912). After 1910, this reform movement tended to be concerned more with the threat from the Left than the power of the Right. By 1912 the nations Socialists were running well in elections. The First World War heightened these class tensions. Labor unrest, culminating in a series of violent strikes in 1919, led the government to call for interclass harmony and to pass laws directed against aliens and radicals. A postwar Red Scare, fed by the belief that the unrest of the time was the product of a conspiracy led by RussianJewish Communists, resulted in mass arrests and deportations. Xenophobia and anti-radicalism were conspicuous in the ensuing decade. A clandestine, often violent organization called the Klan was a force to be reckoned with. Meanwhile, the government moved sharply to the Right, adopting policies of economic nationalism (higher tariffs) and fiscal conservatism (reduced government spending). This is a capsule rendering not of public life in the early twentiethcentury United States, but in early twentieth-century Argentina: the Argentina of Hipolito Yrigoyen and his Radical Party, Saenz Pefia and his 1912 electoral law, the strikes of the Semana Tragica of January 1919, the

A Reply to William Becker

I am of course pleased that Professor Becker finds my view of the character and sources of early twentieth-century American economic policy to be “well supported” by the evidence. I value the fact that he does not regard as heresy my failing to call the American economy “corporate” and regulation “corporatist” or “corporate liberal.” And I appreciate his recognition that my book deals with more than that old standby big-business-and-antitrust: that it talks about the impact of new technology (radio, the movies, airplanes, telephones, electricity, motor vehicles) on regulatory policy; about the regulation of farm prices and natural resources; about urban housing and zoning; about labor and taxation and tariffs and banking and investment—in short, about a complex and rapidly changing regulatory order, and not just government and big business.

Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change In America, 1900-1933.

Morton Keller, a leading scholar of twentieth-century American history, describes the complex interplay between rapid economic change and regulatory policy. In its portrait of the response of American politics and law to a changing economy, this book provides a fresh understanding of emerging public policy for a modern nation.