As editor of the Washington Bee, a Black owned newspaper based in Washington, D.C., during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, William Calvin Chase waged a vigorous campaign against Prohibition. Among the targets of his crusade were ministers, politicians, civic leaders, and other anti-liquor reformers concerned about the effects of alcohol consumption on society. This article explores Chase’s anti-prohibitionist rhetoric in the Washington Bee. It contends that, in the process of his anti-prohibitionist crusade, Chase flagged racism, racial violence, and Jim Crow as problems far more injurious to the Black community than the consumption and sale of alcohol. In so doing, it situates Chase and his rhetoric within the larger tradition of Black intellectual resistance as he leveraged the Bee to counter arguments in support of anti-alcohol reforms that swept the nation during the Progressive Era.

Between 1860 and 1930, the Canada-United States border emerged as a crucial economic boundary. In creating the border, however, Canada and the United States prioritized revenue generation over coherence or uniformity. This priority created an unpredictable barrier for both businesses and individuals. Consuls often focused their attention on understanding the impacts of tariffs, trade volume, and smuggling on transnational commerce. The border’s practical impacts, however, went far deeper. For individuals, the border’s unpredictability shaped everything from how they gave gifts to the ways they supported their families. For businesses, the border impacted profit margins and intellectual property. But it also changed how businesses approached administrative tasks—everything from staff training to who they delegated to fill out paperwork. Although imagined as a federal project, the border’s tolerances for variation ensured that regional and local solutions proliferated. Federal mandates merged with local interests to create an inconsistent barrier of ever-changing heights.

Both historians of science and Americanists have depicted famed nineteenth-century astronomer and political economist Simon Newcomb as a relatively stern “mugwump,” impressive in his scientific achievement, yet at times stunted by a parochial arrogance. In histories of nineteenth-century liberalism, in particular, Newcomb makes cameos as a stand-in for an economically conservative wing. This article analyzes two facets of Newcomb’s postwar thinking that have been consistently left out: race and nationalism. After the Civil War, Newcomb pushed a nationalist discourse of American scientific progress in The North American Review that at times wavered between cultural and biological determinism. He spoke in terms of national styles and believed that American science, opposed to French, German, or English science, languished. His advocacy for an American science rested upon implicit “ethnoracial” nationalist assumptions. Contrary to his laissez-faire liberalism, it called for a more activist scientific state, and feared a nationalism of apathy that he believed pervaded both American science and politics. This article, moreover, argues that Newcomb’s thought was intimately tied to his experiences in postbellum Washington, suggesting the need for more localist and urban studies of the rise of state science after the Civil War.

Contributions to this forum underscore the fact that mass migration during the Progressive Era coincided with the emergence of mass consumption. Progressive Era immigration studies are at the core of the emergent knowledge economy of the age of abundance, centered on an American standard of living that was associated with high wages, affordable goods, more leisure time, and opportunities for material and cultural self-realization. The taxonomies created during the transition to consumer capitalism frequently pathologized immigrants. In their classifications, many Progressive Era protagonists associated immigrants with a low standard of living that manifested itself in unhygienic lifestyles, unhealthy nutrition, and inappropriate consumption. In this reading, categories such as race and ethnicity are part of the construction of the figure of the consumer and the politics of consumption; they reflect modern consumerist subjectivities and structures.

In February 1920, Los Angeles County Health Officer J. L. Pomeroy commented on the habits and practices of Asian immigrants:

In the Progressive Era, the standard of living became a social scientific and policy-relevant bureaucratic measurement. As historians have shown, the ostensibly objective statistical metric of consumption challenged a “market-driven conception of wages or income” and rested on normative assumptions about the ideal standard, family roles, and labor relations.1 It was also embedded in a discourse on who could attain it and how. A migrant-knowledge approach to the development of standard of living measurements explores how American social scientists drew these normative contours in relation to their experience and understanding of what they termed the immigration problem, the influx of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who sought to live and work in the United States between the 1880s and 1920s. Migrant knowledge encompasses knowledge both by and about immigrants, drawing attention to immigrant actors who cross state borders, bring cultural baggage along with material belongings, and often maintain ties to their places of origin. This concept assumes that immigrants do not have particular knowledge by virtue of being immigrants; rather, it asks how immigration-related experiences, discourses, and institutions shape modes of knowing and communicating that knowledge. It takes knowledge as embodied practice, influenced by material conditions as well as its own materiality.2 This approach frames the debate on immigration and the standard of living as a mutual engagement of both immigrants and native-born Americans, made tangible through their knowledge practices.

Today’s “democratic ideal,” claimed Columbia University economist E. R. A. Seligman, was nothing more and nothing less than the “socialization of luxury,” the opportunity for everyone to find pleasure and contentment in the world around them. In early twentieth-century America, an era of growing material abundance, democratic life required that “leisure and culture will no longer be the possessions of the favored few” but be available to everyone in the course of daily life. Seligman’s insistence that democracy was as much in the streets as in the voting booth was far from novel, as he surely knew. Seligman lived in New York City, where working-class men and women made the same point every day. They laid claim to the new abundance of American life, an abundance they helped create, each time they put on fancy hats, went to Coney Island, strolled through Central Park, listened to opera, or laughed at vaudeville. Seligman translated their actions into economic prose and made a theoretical, as well as practical, argument for pleasurable consumption as a basis for modern democratic life.1

The promise of a full stomach drew many emigrants to the United States. Defending an American standard of living—one that included steak dinners—was also an argument marshaled in favor of immigration restriction. By the turn of the twentieth century, food in the United States had become abundant enough for people to no longer strive for a full belly only. About half of the population was still involved in agriculture, but with a clear trend of fewer people necessary to produce more food.1 Consumers emerged as an important political factor. Government policies and agencies concerned with consumer protection and food production mushroomed, with the Food and Drug Administration forming in 1906. Some of these agencies had opposite goals. For instance, David Fairchild headed the Office of Plant and Seed Introduction (founded 1898), scouring the world for food crops to enrich American agriculture and palates. Meanwhile, at about the same time, the Bureau of Entomology, tasked with the study of insects, became concerned about the introduction of foreign pests, leading to the Plant Quarantine Act of 1912.2

Scholars of the politics of consumption in the United States have argued that the early twentieth century marked the emergence of a new kind of “economic” or “consumer citizenship” which linked Americans’ political identity with their ability to access and afford mass-produced goods.1 A fuller examination of the participation of immigrants in these economistic visions of citizenship remains to be established. The years surrounding World War I and the 1918 flu pandemic, Max Ehrenfreund has recently suggested, constituted a critical moment when consumption and citizenship became more tightly linked not only through the choice to consume but also to refrain from consumption.2 In this piece, I explore “financial citizenship,” a term I used to describe an alternative form of civic belonging linking affinities for markets and politics.3 Financial citizenship—namely, the public outcry for a more responsive economic system that could provide cash for everyday transactions, efficient access to credit, and a variety of financial instruments for other purposes—was a vision raised by a broad range of demographic groups, from northeastern ironworkers to midwestern farmers to Black wage workers in the urban New South.4