Early in 1944 the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certified Local 22 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) as the bargaining agent for manufacturing workers at the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company (RJR) in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The local was built and largely sustained by the collective actions of African Americans, especially women, who quickly made it the primary institutional locus advancing the racial aspirations of Winston-Salem's black working class. Operating the largest tobacco manufacturing facility in the world and employing a workforce of 12,000, none unionized (Tilley 1948, 1985), RJR vigorously fought the local from its inception.

There are three sources of information about undercounts in nineteenth-century U.S. censuses: demographic analyses of net undercounts by age, sex, and race at the national level; record-linkage studies of gross undercounts for local communities; and contemporary testimony of the types and bases of underenumeration. This article reviews the strengths and limitations of each of these sources, assesses the extent of their agreement, and discusses the bases of their disagreement.

This special section of Social Science History launches a series of five articles illustrative of what we believe is an eclectic center in the development of historical studies of institutions and policies, often termed the “new institutionalism.” The new institutionalism emerged in the early 1980s in reaction to “a long season in which social forces and processes were the predominant topics of study” (Orren and Skowronek 1986). While the precise role of institutions varies according to the practitioner, hallmarks of the new institutionalism include a portrayal of institutions as semiautonomous actors; a contextualization of institutions within sociohistorical processes (and vice versa); a recognition of inefficiency, contingency, and accident in history; and a recognition of the relative autonomy of ideas and symbolic action in historical development (March and Olsen 1984, 1989; Krasner 1984; Smith 1988; Katznelson 1992). As is expected of new paradigms, the entry of the new institutionalism into the intellectual community has been marked by an array of polemics against its predecessors, “old” schools defined by “old institutionalism,” behaviorism, and structural functionalism. It has also generated a wave of spirited counterattacks (Mitchell 1991; Bendix et al. 1992; Ethington and McDonagh forthcoming).

Henry Adams (1918:7) once described nineteenth-century Massachusetts party politics as the “systematic organization of hatreds.” At first glance, his observation appears to be true for the early twentieth century as well, especially for Boston, where Brahmin reformers battled Irish bosses in an apparent reprise of a half-century-old conflict. But a closer examination reveals that while ethnic hatreds grew stronger in the city's twentieth-century public life, Progressive reform weakened partisan organization. In fact, political modernization produced tribal politics; such was Progressivism's ironic legacy in Boston. When the city's politics shifted from contests between grassroots parties to battles over shaping public opinion, ethnicity replaced partisanship as the primary source of local political identification. Conflict between Yankee and Irish now defined the city's public life as never before.

The New Deal marked a critical conjuncture of civil rights and welfare policy in American political development. During the Progressive Era, civil rights policy and social policy developed independently and often antithetically. While the American state expanded its reach in economic regulation and social welfare, laying the institutional and intellectual groundwork for the New Deal, policies aimed at protecting the rights of minorities progressed barely at all (McDonagh 1993). But with the Great Depression, the welfare and civil rights agendas came together powerfully. For African Americans, who had already been relegated to the bottom of the political economy, the Depression created even more desperate conditions, and issues of economic opportunity and relief became paramount. The African American political community pursued an agenda that linked advances in civil rights to expansions of the state's role in social welfare (Hamilton and Hamilton 1992).