This article examines the World War I service of the University of Michigan historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips (1877–1934). Phillips worked first with black recruits as a volunteer officer for the Young Men's Christian Association at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and later as a U.S. Army Military Intelligence officer in Washington, DC. In these years, Phillips ranked as America's foremost authority on the antebellum South generally and of African American slavery in particular. In 1918 he published his landmark American Negro Slavery. While on leave from Ann Arbor, Phillips taught English and French, planned educational and recreational programs, and supervised the management and construction of buildings at Camp Gordon's segregated facilities. Phillips's daily interactions with black troops in the cantonment reaffirmed—at least as he saw it—his conclusions that North American slavery had been a relatively benign institution, his belief in the virtues of plantation paternalism and in the management of subject peoples by educated whites, and his attitude that contemporary race relations were generally harmonious. Phillips's observations of African American recruits validated his conviction that blacks benefited most from white-run, regimented organizations and strengthened his belief in economic assimilation and social segregation. His military intelligence work confirmed Phillips's overall commitment to conservative change, whether in foreign or race relations.

This essay examines the influence of the social purity movement on the U.S. government's campaign to protect servicemen from the temptations of drink and illicit sex during World War I. This influence had been forged in the context of U.S. imperialism in the two decades prior to American entry into the war, as purity reformers linked the sexual morality and temperance of soldiers serving in occupied territories overseas to racial purity and national character at home. War Department policymakers who were allied with the purity movement likewise understood male moral restraint and sexual self-control to underpin democratic self-governance. This linkage between civic virtue and moral virtue was especially problematic at the outset of the war, as many native-born Americans (progressive policymakers included) questioned whether all members of the ethnically and racially diverse nation had the capacity for self-government. The goals of social purity and wartime policymakers were thus aligned as the War Department launched its crusade against liquor and sexual vice within the military. Government officials required moral sobriety of servicemen in order to remake the body politic. But even as they demanded virtuous conduct from the man in uniform, they simultaneously infantilized the “soldier lad” in their effort to safeguard him.

A little over thirty years ago at the invitation of Stanley Kutler at Reviews in American History, I spent a summer trying to puzzle through the historiography surrounding Progressive Era society and politics. “In Search of Progressivism” the result was titled, and it has had a much longer life than most historiographical pieces of that sort do. Many excellent historiographical treatments of the Progressive Era have been published since that essay's appearance in 1982, along with a huge amount of historical writing. The field has burgeoned in ways that were barely visible thirty years ago. And yet the essay endures, and from time to time I think of revisiting and revising it.

When David Montgomery sat down for an extended interview with editors of the Radical History Review, Mark Naison and Paul Buhle, it was the spring of 1981. His career as an academic historian was on the ascent. He had moved from the University of Pittsburgh to a named chair at Yale. He was editor of what was becoming the foremost journal in the field, International Labor and Working-Class History. His studies of workers and Reconstruction and his explorations of workers' shop floor world had catapulted him to the front rank of practitioners of the “new labor history.” And he was deeply into what would probably rank as his masterwork, The Fall of the House of Labor, published six years later. But much of the interview as published dwelt on his background in the Communist Party USA and on his own shop floor experience as a militant rank and file machinist during the 1950s. His observations on the internal life of the party, as someone who did not hold a leadership position, were perceptive. But perhaps more telling for his own future work as a historian were his comments on the growing gap in the 1950s between the party and lives of workers. Vital as the “connection to the everyday struggles of Americans” may have been, he also recognized the value of “styles of social analysis that were rooted in the hard and complex realities of experience and away from phrase-mongering and dogmatic abstractions.” As the party unraveled in the 1950s and the leadership grew more isolated, he noted, “at my level of activity we continued from day to day doing our thing”

Several historians have recently demonstrated that ideas generated initially by the Populists found their way into Progressive Era reform, New Deal/Great Society liberalism, and even today's Democratic Party politics. The only trouble is that the vast majority of the Populists themselves did not make the journey. Once a bastion of anti-corporatism, support for labor, “women's improvement,” the graduated income tax, and government regulation of the economy, the rural states of the Great Plains and American South became fortresses of what Bethany Moreton has called “Christian Free Enterprise,” with strong anti-statist and socially conservative agendas. A decade ago Thomas Frank noticed this remarkable shift on the Great Plains and wondered “What's the Matter with Kansas?” Despite many new works on the economic impact of the Cold War in rural America, we still do not have a comprehensive answer to his question. In this essay, I examine a contrast that other historians of rural politics have overlooked in large part because it goes beyond economic policy, strictly defined: what Kansans (and residents of other rural, Great Plains states that supported the People's Party) once thought about the role of the United States military and what many believe now. Understanding this striking contrast will lead to understanding more fully the origins of today's “red” state politics. Furthermore, it can highlight more subtle signs that some aspects of Populist anti-militarism may have survived this otherwise fervent shift to the right.

Two historic moments from the run-up to the 2012 presidential election might well stir the interest of readers of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era:

December 6, 2011: President Barack Obama traveled to Osawatomie, Kansas, to deliver what proved to be his signature speech about the economy. Indeed, former labor secretary Robert Reich called the address, “the most important economic speech of his or any modern presidency.” Obama castigated radical free marketeers, he vindicated communal bonds, and he upheld the great middle class. And the reason that the president traveled to the metropolis of Osawatomie? Because in 1910 Theodore Roosevelt had gone there to repudiate the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age and put forth his case for a progressive “New Nationalism” in an oration that White House press secretary Jay Carney characterized as “the speech that really set the course for the 20th century.”