The Framers of the U.S. Constitution saw the Senate as their paramount creation. To James Madison, it was “the great anchor of the government,” and in his seminal plans for a new national government, the Senate figured as the most prominent and powerful institution, to be endowed with a potent combination of legislative, executive, and judicial prerogatives that were greater and more wide-ranging than those of either the House or the president. In the four months that the Framers met in Philadelphia, they spent more time and energy deliberating on the Senate than on any other single institution or issue, devoting most of the first seven critical weeks to the upper house, and thereafter, though more scattered, the equivalent of another week or two of consideration. In contrast, they focused on the House, executive, and federal judiciary for a few weeks each at most, and spent even less time on such vital issues as sectionalism and slavery. By the end of the Convention, the Framers had created an imposing chamber, possessing far more power and autonomy than any other upper house heretofore created in independent America. Small wonder, then, that in assessing the work of the Convention, the influential delegate from Connecticut, Roger Sherman, pronounced it “the most important branch in the government.” Smaller wonder still that the Framers would comprise over half the membership of the first Senate.

An enduring contribution of the new institutionalism is its affirmation of the significance of the Progressive era. As a result, we have learned not only how the “big bang” explosion of welfare legislation in the New Deal rests upon structures and precedents set in the early twentieth-century decades, but also how this early reform period continues to influence contemporary policies and politics. Alan Dawley, Bruce Ackerman, and Morton Keller, for example, point to an activist state established in the Progressive era to check a laissez-faire governing system as the foundation of subsequent New Deal accomplishments upon which reformers built “where progressives had left off.” Theda Skocpol adds a cross-national perspective, showing how the American welfare state instituted in the early twentieth century evidenced a distinctive “maternalist” dynamic oriented toward addressing women's economic needs, in contrast to “paternalistic” norms in Western European nations assisting male workers.

Perhaps no single aspect of the American polity has been more analyzed, discussed, cited for evidence in grand theories of American political development, and yet less understood than the role of the urban voter in the regime formation and policy innovation of the Progressive era (circa 1890–1920). One century of prolific urban political analysis has produced an abundance of evidence, theory, and keen insight, yet we still have nothing like a systematic survey of urban voting behavior using reliable multivariate methods in more than a few elections or comparatively across several cities simultaneously. As a consequence, we have built for the urban voter a city of theoretical models without an adequate empirical infrastructure.

The traditional view of the 1920s as a decade of economic avarice, political corruption, and self-indulgence has been replaced by a more nuanced interpretation. Innovative approaches to the use of governmental power which thrived in the Progressive era were carried forward into the Age of Normalcy, and new dimensions were added, sometimes with quite interesting results. Moreover, the ideas and institutions tested in the 1920s were then at hand for expanded use and further modification in the next cycle of major reform, in the 1930s.

The aim of this research note is to begin to develop the idea that trade unions are historically constructed as much through considerations of social identity as they are through calculations of economic self-interest, market power, or functional adaptation in the face of changes in the division of labor. By social identity, I mean the desire for group distinction, dignity, and place within historically specific discourses (or frames of understanding) about the character, structure, and boundaries of the polity and the economy. Institutions such as trade unions, in other words, are constituted through and by particular understandings of the structure of the social and political worlds of which they are part. In making this argument, it should be immediately said that I in no way intend to claim that trade unions are only to be understood through the lens of identity or that they do not engage in strategic calculation either in labor markets or in the broader political economy. The point is that action along the latter lines presupposes some kind of commitment on, and even resolution of, issues concerning the former. The discussion below focuses on the emergence of trade union movements in the United States and Germany during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It Attempts first to develope the two cases as constituting a paradox and then, second, explains the paradox with an argument about identity.