Like many midwestern cities in the nineteenth century, Cincinnati, Ohio, was home to large numbers of German immigrant musicians, among them the founders of the Cincinnati Grand Orchestra in 1872. Their model of musician-based organization eventually ran counter to the prestige-building potential of Western art music, which made it attractive to local civic leaders determined to earn respect for their city at a national level. The successful Cincinnati May festivals beginning in 1873 under the artistic leadership of conductor Theodore Thomas brought the city the desired renown. But the musical monumentality needed for large festival performances could not be obtained locally, leaving Cincinnati's players with opportunities to perform at a high level but without a way to define their performance as a significant achievement in the world of high art. Although their orchestra was ultimately unsuccessful, however, these musicians demonstrated an agency that transcends their historical obscurity and helps incorporate aesthetic and practical aspects of institution-building into the social arguments common to discussions of Western art music in the United States.

William Vandever (1817–1893) served as a U.S. Indian inspector from 1873 until early 1878. A lawyer by profession, Vandever had been a Republican congressman from Iowa and a Civil War officer. (Later, he would return to Congress, representing California.). While serving with the Indian Office, he became a critic of the militarization of federal Indian policy, so much so as to be reprimanded and not reappointed. His experience enables a reconsideration of President U.S. Grant's peace policy in at least two areas. First, as one of a new group of Office of Indian Affairs officials, Vandever provides a view of federal Indian policy from the middle level of the federal bureaucracy during the 1870s. His case especially illustrates his bureau's attempts to centralize civilian management of Indian reservations. Second, Vandever's policy criticisms, though they assumed white American “civilization” as normative, more immediately arose from his religious perspective. Although he lost his post, Vandever serves to highlight the privileged role of white Protestantism during Grant's peace policy. He exemplified a set of racialized religious sensibilities that were important at the time and that could be termed Protestant whiteness.

The largest organization of capitalists during the Progressive Era was one that most American historians have never heard of. Motivated primarily by overproduction and ruthless competition, many of the nation's largest manufacturers, distributors, and commercial banks formed the National Association of Credit Men (NACM) in 1896 to reduce the supply of credit available to retailers and consumers. The story of the Credit Men confirms many standard assumptions regarding the rise of corporate America to economic power and cultural legitimacy while challenging others. Advances in technology and salaried organization made possible their mobilization, yet more important was the significant lag in the development of mass retail institutions and consequently mass consumerism behind mass production and distribution. The NACM deployed standardized methods and hungered for administrative efficiency but used these modern tools to instill order and ethical discipline in the nation's business, not to secularize the economy and culture of the new century. America's corporate capitalists seized power by promising moral regulation for unbridled individualism.

The three essays in this forum examine the ways in which individuals have sought to reconcile sociocultural differences between those at the fringes of American society and those at the center. Two concepts embody this effort. One is the bridge concept—the idea that those with dual identities would serve as links between the two sociocultural worlds. The other concept, that of the cultural broker, refers to someone who actively seeks to mediate the differences between the two groups. The essays in this cluster use the two concepts to analyze the ways in which individuals in three disparate places—the American West (California), a U.S. colony across the Pacific (the Philippines), and the American Southwest (New Mexico)—served as bridges and brokers in their efforts to negotiate the imbalance of power between dominant and subordinate groups.

Joseph Kurihara was a son of immigrants, a Japanese American who did everything he could to become a bridge of understanding. Ultimately, however, he came to believe that the bridge that he had built was made of straw.

How did he come to this conclusion? When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Kurihara immediately volunteered his services for the war effort. He volunteered a number of times but to no avail. Instead, he was rejected and—like other Japanese Americans and their parents—he was forced to leave his home and job, and move to what the U.S. government first called “concentration camps” and later, euphemistically, “relocation centers.” What Kurihara learned later, he said, was that his “Japanese features” and his job as a fishing-boat navigator made him suspect in the eyes of the U. S. government, and as a result FBI agents had been tailing him since the Pearl Harbor attack. He could accept these actions as government mistakes.

A 1910 Normal School Yearbook featured six young women in basketball uniforms. Sixteen-year-old Paz Marquez, the tallest among them and the captain of the team, looks out unsmilingly. In the early years of the century, photographs of women's basketball teams appeared in hundreds of normal-school yearbooks across the American landscape, but this photo came from the normal school in Manila. Two years later, sharing another American ritual, the former team captain graced the cover of the weekly magazine Renacimiento Filipino, this time dressed in a luxurious gown befitting the Queen of the Carnival. That same year, 1912, Paz Marquez graduated with a B.A. in the first class from the College of Liberal Arts at the newly formed, secular University of the Philippines. Participating in commonplace American events, Paz Marquez (later Benitez) acted as a bridge, a link, between two cultures. Over the next decades, Paz continued in this role. In addition, however, she also became a cultural broker, as she confronted the conundrum that the use of English as the official language had imposed on Filipino culture. In these ways, Paz illustrates the complicated and intriguing story of U.S. nation-building from an intimate and distinctly Philippine viewpoint.

New Mexicans pride themselves on their ability to bridge multicultural divides. Part of what we are urged to understand as “enchanting” about the Land of Enchantment is its diverse cultural background. Native American, Hispano, and Anglo have existed side by side, at times with remarkable harmony and good will, for nearly two centuries. The Land of Enchantment is not altogether a fantasy. Many New Mexicans have shown an uncanny ability to bridge ethnic divides and find common ground in the interstices between cultures. The soil of New Mexico seems to be fertile ground indeed for producing cultural brokers. Margaret Connell Szasz admits that living in New Mexico makes her particularly attuned to the role of the cultural broker.