This essay defends the Populists against charges that they espoused an irrationally conspiratorial view of American history. Focusing on monetary policy, and the free silver issue in particular, I argue that the Populists correctly suspected that bankers conspired to demonetize silver and demonstrate that William Ralston, president of The Bank of California, secretly bribed Treasury Department bureaucrats and used Western congressmen to pass the Coinage Act of 1873. Ralston's involvement in silver's demonetization has important ramifications for our understanding of the free silver movement. Some of the congressmen who helped Ralston demonetize silver paradoxically went on to lead the free silver movement, blaming Eastern financiers for the measure they helped pass, and created organizations such as the American Bimetallic League and the American Bimetallic Party, organizations that popularized the ideas subsequently adopted by the Populists and William Jennings Bryan. As some leaders of the free silver movement were deeply involved in silver's demonetization, this period exhibited levels of duplicity that have been unrecognized until now.

Antebellum states were critical in supporting the emerging rail system of the nineteenth century, yet not all states engaged in active rail promotion efforts. In this analysis, I consider how local economic and political conditions, as well as the rail promotion activities of a state's contiguous neighbors, impacted a legislature's rail promotion decisions. The findings suggest that states only engaged in rail promotion when local infrastructure was of poor quality and a state's tax revenues were sufficient to support rail expenditures. These findings reveal that diffusion, powered by social learning, does not drive all state policy innovations. Instead, local conditions and parallel thinking are important factors in state policy development. Furthermore, the analysis underscores the power of local governments in the antebellum period, while also raising the question of whether such diffuse state building was effective.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the United States transformed itself from a commercial republic into a major international actor and acquired its first overseas colonies and dependencies. This article investigates the role of public-private partnerships between American state officials and American financiers in the management and expansion of American empire. Confronted with tepid support from Congress for further imperial expansion and development, colonial bureaucrats looked to investment bankers to accomplish goals for which they lacked the financial capacity and political support to achieve independently. These partnerships were soon formalized as “Dollar Diplomacy,” an arrangement that would govern America's imperial strategy in the Caribbean. This article highlights two theoretical processes: (1) the downstream effects of congressional delegation decisions and their role in motivating institutional adaptations, and (2) the formation of public-private partnerships as an alternative means of state development, and the unique pitfalls of this approach. To illustrate these mechanisms, this article presents historical narratives, based largely on archival research, on the emergence of this Dollar Diplomacy partnership in the formal American colonies, the spread of this system of imperialism to the Caribbean, and its partial collapse during the early Wilson administration.

One of the key questions posed by analysts of modern, twentieth-century agricultural politics is, “How and when did agrarian democracy end and the dominance of agribusiness interests begin?” In this article I argue that the roots of this transformation lie in the origins of the agricultural welfare state and the overlapping of its birth with distinct eras in America's racial orders—those moments in time when political players mobilized coalitions and institutions around racial issues such as slavery, Reconstruction, or the segregated state of the Jim Crow order. As a result of these historical overlaps, the agricultural welfare state was shaped in surprising and not-well-understood ways by America's racial orders. In order to trace these two intertwining aspects of racial governance and agricultural welfare state development, I provide a reinterpretation of the development of the agricultural welfare state from its Civil War origins to its New Deal transformation. I show that, from 1865 to 1964, the confluence of racial orders, partisan alignments, and congressional orders created an agricultural welfare state in which African Americans were variously included and excluded in a pattern of “two-tier” citizenship. The broader racial governance aims of the Jim Crow order also had a significant role in shaping the development of the organizational ethos and administrative structures and practices within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The practice of “two-tier” agricultural citizenship, which initially affected only African American and other minority farmers, was gradually extended to reflect the divide between large commercial farmers and the rural poor (including small farmers). The results from this analysis strengthen our understanding of how the American welfare state has been shaped—in particular, the ways in which racial governance and racial orders are deeply embedded in the American state building process.

The seemingly wide opening for liberal domestic policy innovation by the U.S. federal government in the early-to-mid-1930s gave way to a much more limited agenda in the late 1930s and 1940s. The latter years saw the consolidation and gradual extension of several key programs (e.g., Social Security and Keynesian macroeconomic management), but also the frustration of liberal hopes for an expansive “cradle-to-grave” welfare state marked by strong national unions, national health insurance, and full employment policies. Drawing upon rarely used early public opinion polls, we explore the dynamics of public opinion regarding New Deal liberalism during this pivotal era. We argue that a broadly based reaction against labor unions created a difficult backdrop for liberal programmatic advances. We find that this anti-labor reaction was especially virulent in the South but divided even Northern Democrats, thus creating an effective wedge issue for Republicans and their Southern conservative allies. More generally, we find that the mass public favored most of the specific programs created by the New Deal, but was hardly clamoring for major expansions of the national government's role in the late 1930s and 1940s. These findings illuminate the role played by the South in constraining New Deal liberalism while also highlighting the tenuousness of the liberal majority in the North.

The Corrugated and Solid Fiber Shipping Container Industry Code was one of the only successful codes in the National Recovery Administration (NRA). Compliance was high. It increased production, wages, employment, and product diversity. NRA administrators marveled at its success. Why? And why have historical and rational-choice institutionalists, studying the NRA, overlooked the container code? This paper provides two answers: one microbehavioral, the other macrohistorical. At a micro level, it is impossible to understand the container code with rational-choice theory. It was successful not because it coordinated and enforced collective action, but because it organized “collaborative learning.” The code showed manufacturers how to compete over productivity and product diversity instead of volume. At a macro level, historical institutionalists miss the movement that spawned the container code, because they search in vain for liberal corporatism and state autonomy. Instead, this paper shows how the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) led a movement of cost accountants, trade associations, and peak business associations in an effort to channel competition from predation into improvement in products and production processes through “developmental trade associations.” The container code drew its personnel and practices from this project. In order to make sense of the container code, I introduce a novel theory of institutions, called “creative syncretism.”

Contemporary conservatism places an affinity for, fidelity to, and defense of the U.S. Constitution at the center of its electoral, institutional, and movement politics. Through a survey of popular constitutional discourse in postwar conservatism's premiere magazine, National Review between 1955 and 1980—presented in the context of the development of (conservative) political thought and the institutional infrastructure for idea generation and propagation—I argue that that defense began to assume an ecumenically populist, antielitist, and antijudicial form only beginning in the mid-1950s, and a shared commitment to “originalism” only in the late 1970s. From the 1950s through the late 1970s, conservative constitutional argument was centered not on the judiciary, but rather on the (often divisive) constitutionalism of Congress and the executive, and on divergent views concerning structuralist versus moralist constitutional understandings. Over time, however, through dialogic engagement taking place over and through unfolding political events, the movement's diverse intellectual strands reframed and reinforced their relationship by focusing less on their differences and more on an ecumenically shared populist critique of judicial power emphasizing a virtuous demos arrayed against an ideologically driven, antidemocratic, law-wielding elite. During this formative period, besides advocating a particular approach to textual interpretation, constitutional discourse played a critical role in fashioning movement symbols and signifiers, forming hopes and apprehensions, defining threats and reassurances, marking friends and enemies, stimulating feelings of belonging and alienation, fidelity and betrayal, and evoking both rational logics and intense emotions—all of which motivate and inform the heavily constitutionalized politics of American conservatism today.

Let me begin with the bottom line: Samuel DeCanio has addressed a very important topic, skillfully crafted an argument, and marshaled an impressive body of evidence behind his thesis. The result is a significant addition to the literature on American political development on several different levels. And that is so despite the fact that I believe his interpretation extends beyond the evidence in some respects. This comment addresses both these extensions and, as a collateral objective, suggests that the way in which we reconstruct political situations and causal relationships is inevitably an art, not a science.

Richard Bensel's comment on my article “Populism, Paranoia, and the Politics of Free Silver” is, like all of his writing, thoughtful, careful, detailed, and well written. However, I find that I disagree with a number of Bensel's points. In this response I try to clarify areas of disagreement and point to several cases where I believe my argument has been slightly misconstrued, which is understandable given the length and complexity of the paper.