When I retired in 1991 my first project was to revise The Response to Industrialism, which covered the years from 1877 to 1914. These, of course, are the years we call the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era. When the University of Chicago Press asked if I would undertake a revision as part of their desire to update several books in the History of American Civilization Series, I readily agreed. I did so with some instinctive understanding that much about the book would undergo revision, but just what I did not have clearly in mind. Much had changed in the profession, and much had changed in the way I thought about that period in American history. As I worked my way through the first edition the details of those changes became more clear. And so I prepared an introduction to the revision that outlined for the reader just what had changed in my thinking over those forty years.

On Friday, April 5, 1878, Benjamin F. Butler, a Republican from Massachusetts, arose in the U.S. House of Representatives and offered a resolution stating “that the true Union, maimed soldier, Brigadier-General James Shields” be chosen as doorkeeper of that body. Although a seemingly innocuous motion, Butler's resolution would spark a debate over the election of a doorkeeper that would last into the following week. That debate — and the reactions to it — are in turn quite revealing of the political environment of the time. Specifically, the “doorkeeper controversy” of 1878 symbolizes the persistence of sectionalism in the immediate post-Reconstruction years. It also provides yet another example of the turmoil and controversy that characterized Ben Butler's colorful political career.

In May of 1896, Richard Bartholdt, a Republican from Missouri and a German immigrant, stood on the floor of the House of Representatives and introduced a bill that would set off months of debate in the Fifty-Fourth Congress. The bill was H.R. 7864, which required all male immigrants between the ages of sixteen and sixty to prove they were literate in either English or some other language. While congressmen on all sides of the issue made passionate arguments for and against this bill, they nevertheless found some areas of agreement. The supporters and opponents of restriction all regarded southern and eastern European immigrants as racially different than those of northwestern European descent. Further, all congressmen understood the purpose of the bill to be as much about improving the United States citizenry racially as intellectually. Richard Bartholdt clearly stated the racial reasoning behind the literacy test when he introduced the bill to the House.

As his lengthy career neared an end, Rockefeller advisor Frederick T. Gates made a bold and unsuccessful proposal to the trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1924, asking them to invest $265 million in the China Medical Board. Founded in 1914, the China Medical Board (CMB) was one of the earliest ventures of the Rockefeller Foundation, the most prominent of the Progressive Era's giant secular philanthropic foundations. The CMB was also the last major philanthropic effort by Gates, the man most responsible for shifting the Rockefellers from denominational charity to international philanthropy. After a decade in existence, the CMB had not come close to realizing the hopes of its founder. Only with this massive, unprecedented infusion of capital, Gates explained, could his dream “spring into existence full panoplied.” This dream was never fully realized because of its astonishingly grandiose scale and complexity: its goal was to make Chinese medical care the finest in the world, and in the process close the chasm that he saw between denominational Christianity and the needs of the modern world. Although the story of the China Medical Board is the story of a failed vision, it also affords a glimpse of the cracks at the base of modern American philanthropy.

There was an error in the October 2003 listing of scholars who had reviewed manuscripts submitted to the JGAPE. The appropriate acknowledgment should have been to Gayle Gullett, not Gayle Gullett Escobar. The editor regrets this mistake.