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Joseph F. Spillane

“Even-handed and free of jargon … a revealing account of how our criminal justice system operates on the ground level.” —Edward D. Berkowitz, author of Mass Appeal

Joseph F. Spillane examines the failure of progressive reform in New York State by focusing on Coxsackie, a New Deal reformatory built for young male offenders. Opened in 1935 to serve “adolescents adrift, ” Coxsackie instead became an unstable and brutalizing prison. From the start, the liberal impulse underpinning the prison’s mission was overwhelmed by challenges it was unequipped or unwilling to face—drugs, gangs, and racial conflict.

Spillane draws on detailed prison records to reconstruct a life behind bars in which “ungovernable” young men posed constant challenges to racial and cultural order. The New Deal order of the prison was unstable from the start; the politics of punishment quickly became the politics of race and social exclusion, and efforts to save liberal reform in postwar New York only deepened its failures. In 1977, inmates took hostages to focus attention on their grievances. The result was stricter discipline and an end to any pretense that Coxsackie was a reform institution.

In today’s era of mass incarceration, prisons have become conflict-ridden warehouses and powerful symbols of racism and inequality. This account challenges the conventional wisdom that America’s prison crisis is of comparatively recent vintage, showing instead how a racial and punitive system of control emerged from the ashes of a progressive ideal.

“Should be required reading for historians of juvenile and criminal corrections … Presents a compelling cautionary tale that contemporary would-be reformers ignore at their peril, while offering important new insights for scholars.” —American Historical Review

JHUP

Reconfiguring American Political History

Coxsackie: The Life and Death of Prison Reform

Liette Gidlow

This cultural history of voter turnout campaigns in early 20th century America sheds light on the problems that persist in democratic participation today.

In the 1920s, America experienced low voter turnout at a level not seen in nearly a century. Reformers responded by launching massive campaigns to "Get Out the Vote.” Yet while these campaigns advocated civic participation, they also promoted an exclusionary message that transformed America’s political culture. By the late 1920s, "civic" would be practically synonymous with "middle class" and "white."

At the time, weakened political parties, ascendant consumer culture, labor unrest, Jim Crow, widespread anti-immigration sentiment, and the new woman suffrage all raised serious questions about the meaning of good citizenship. Through techniques ranging from civic education to modern advertising, middle-class and elite whites worked in the realm of culture to undo the equality that constitutional amendments had seemed to achieve.

Richly documented with primary sources from political parties and civic groups, popular and ethnic periodicals, and electoral returns, The Big Vote examines the national Get-Out-the-Vote campaigns as well as the internal dynamics of specific campaigns in New York City, Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Birmingham, Alabama.

Johns Hopkins University Press

The Big Vote: Gender, Consumer Culture, and the Politics of Exclusion, 1890s–1920s

Douglas B. Craig

An “impressively researched and useful study” of the golden age of radio and its role in American democracy (Journal of American History).

In Fireside Politics, Douglas B. Craig provides the first detailed and complete examination of radio’s changing role in American political culture between 1920 and 1940—the medium’s golden age, when it commanded huge national audiences without competition from television.

Craig follows the evolution of radio into a commercialized, networked, and regulated industry, and ultimately into an essential tool for winning political campaigns and shaping American identity in the interwar period. Finally, he draws thoughtful comparisons of the American experience of radio broadcasting and political culture with those of Australia, Britain, and Canada.

“The best general study yet published on the development of radio broadcasting during this crucial period when key institutional and social patterns were established. ” ?Technology and Culture

Fireside Politics: Radio and Political Culture in the United States, 1920–1940

Kate Weigand

The untold history of feminist activism in the American Communist Party from the 1930s–50s and its influence on the women’s liberation movement (Publishers Weekly).

Drawing on substantial new research, historian and archivist Kate Weigand disproved the conventional wisdom that the American Communist Party disregarded women’s issues. Weigand argues that, despite the devastating effects of anti-Communism and Stalinism on the progressive Left of the 1950s, Communist feminists such as Susan B. Anthony II, Betty Millard, and Eleanor Flexner managed to sustain many important elements of their work into the 1960s, when a new generation took up their cause and built an effective movement for women’s liberation.

Red Feminism provides a more complex view of the history of the modern women’s movement, showing how key Communist activists came to understand gender, sexism, and race as central components of culture, economics, and politics in American society.

Red Feminism: American Communism and the Making of Women's Liberation