Browsing by Author "Matusow, Allen J."
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Item A grassroots war on poverty: Community action and urban politics in Houston, 1964-1976(2010) Phelps, Wesley G.; Matusow, Allen J.; Boles, John B.Grassroots studies of the implementation of the federal antipoverty initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s are showing that the War on Poverty did not operate in a vacuum; rather, it was profoundly shaped by a multifarious group of local actors that included public officials, local elites, grassroots antipoverty activists, program administrators, federal volunteers, civil rights activists, and poor people themselves. In Houston, grassroots activists created a local context in which to implement the War on Poverty that was much more diverse in its intellectual and political influences than the rather narrow confines of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. The moderate liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal War on Poverty certainly helped galvanize local antipoverty activists in Houston, but even more prominent in their antipoverty philosophy were Prophetic Christianity, radical civil rights activism, and the vision of participatory democracy and community organizing espoused by members of the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. This local context created a favorable environment for these activists to use the War on Poverty to advance an agenda of social change by empowering the poor and helping then engage in confrontations with the city's elite. By the same token, the diversity of ideas that fueled the implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston---and especially the small victories that grassroots activists were able to achieve in their quest to empower the city's poor---provoked a swift and powerful backlash from local public officials and conservative defenders of the status quo. In Houston, therefore, local political conditions and contests, even more than federal politics, determined how the War on Poverty was fought, and the interaction between the federal antipoverty program and a broad range of local ideas gave the War on Poverty a distinctive flavor in Houston that both created opportunities for grassroots activists to bring about social change and set limits on what those activists could accomplish.Item Allied associates: the relationship between Field-marshal Sir Douglas Haig and General John J. Pershing(1979) Cavin, Deborah C.; Vandiver, Frank E.; Matusow, Allen J.; Drew, Katherine F.Born less than a year apart, Douglas Haig and John J. Pershing were destined to command the armies of their respective nations during the largest conflict the world had yet witnessed. The American seemed an unlikely candidate for such a high position, since he was not the scion of a prestigious or wealthy family, and since he came to soldiering only that he might obtain a college education. Haig, on the other hand, as a younger son of wealthy parents, followed a typical British pattern in choosing the military as a career. Both men served with distinction as young officers in a number of posts throughout the world. They were promoted because of ability and hard work, but each one managed to make influential friends and a helpful marriage along the way. Upon assuming command of the American Expeditionary Forces, Pershing was troubled by jealousy among his rivals, particularly Generals Leonard Wood and Peyton March. But he was steadfastly supported by his superiors, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker and President Woodrow Wilson. They gave him the backing necessary to establish the American Army as a "separate entity" in France, when the Allies continually pleaded for the amalgamation of U. S. troops with British and French units. Replacing Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief as 1916 dawned, Haig also faced enemies at home. Lord French became friendly with Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Haig's bitterest critic, who would gladly have replaced him if he had felt it possible to do so. In George V, however, Sir Douglas had a loyal friend, and the Chief of Imperial General Staff Sir William Robertson was also a staunch ally who guarded Haig's interests against political backbiting. That Britain and the United States emerged closer than before from World War I was due in no small measure to the cordial relations that existed between their army commanders. The friendship which developed between Pershing and Haig was based on several factors: similar ideals about proper professional behavior, discipline, and duty; pride in a common Anglo-Saxon heritage; trust in one another and a joint distrust of the French. Each man thought the other sincere, if sometimes misguided, so that they were able to rise above disagreements concerning not only amalgamation, but also training methods, British shipping plans, supreme command, and the withdrawal of American troops from the British sector as the final offensive began. After the war, the two commanders continued their correspondence, and each worked to cement the friendship between their two nations. Haig, retired but busy with his work for veterans, died in 1928, while Pershing, as Chief of Staff, reorganized the American Army and even lived to see their war "re-fought." At the Great War's end, Pershing and Haig had said, respectively, that the Allies should either push for unconditional surrender or else construct a lenient peace that would not totally humiliate Germany. World War II was due partly to the shortsightedness of the politicians in ignoring the advice of the two commanders. Britain and the United States were not spared another war, but the efforts of the military men nevertheless bore fruit. Pershing had learned much about organization from his British mentor, and he incorporated that knowledge into the post-war U. S. Army structure. And unity of command was not a foreign concept in World War II, since the commanders had struggled with it twenty years earlier. Finally, the friendship between Haig and Pershing served as an example for the two democracies which needed all their joint resources to defeat an aggressive Germany once again.Item "Don't breathe the air": Air pollution and the evolution of environmental policy and politics in the United States, 1945-1970(1997) Dewey, Scott Hamilton; Matusow, Allen J.This thesis discusses the rise of air pollution to become a major public and official concern in America during the 25 years after 1945. What had been largely ignored as a sporadic local smoke nuisance was seen as a nationwide crisis demanding federal intervention by 1970. Although air pollution was among the most salient issues creating a sense of environmental crisis and facilitating the emergence of environmentalism before Earth Day, 1970, recent environmental history studies have largely overlooked it, focusing instead on traditional conservation and wilderness preservation organizations and often criticizing these for their white, male, affluent, "elitist" character. However, the public-health/antipollution wing of early environmentalism drew broader support from women, minorities, and the working class as well, as citizens mobilized regarding real threats, not mere amenities or linguistic constructs. Air pollution was an issue in England, Continental Europe, and America long before 1945 due to health worries and economic damage, yet local government and industry throughout the industrial world long persisted in constructing the issue as merely an aesthetic nuisance, aided by quietist scientific and medical experts. Even after 1945, when major improvements in science and technology expanded control capabilities and understanding, local and state power structures often still ignored the problem and growing public complaints. Consequently, angry citizens increasingly demanded federal intervention to override state/local nonfeasance, and the federal government gradually responded, creating the (now sometimes criticized) present federal regulatory approach to environmental policy. Three case studies--Los Angeles, New York City, and rural central Florida--depict wider variations, contrasts and similarities in the national battle against air pollution and illustrate why traditional localism and federalism were unable to adequately address such aspects of the problem as recalcitrant interstate industries, interstate pollution problems, or state/local governments deliberately sheltering polluting industries. This thesis also reflects on other persistent problems and patterns in environmental policy, such as the politicization of science and medicine to serve as weapons in legal battles for economic purposes, or the general public's frequent refusal, even while blasting major industrial polluters, to accept fully their own responsibility for causing environmental degradation.Item Fighting a New Deal: Intellectual origins of the Reagan Revolution, 1932--1952(2007) Eow, Gregory Teddy; Haskell, Thomas L.; McCann, Samuel G.; Matusow, Allen J.; Twyman, William Gaines; Sher, George; Autrey, Herbert S.This dissertation locates the origins of the modern conservative movement in the intellectual history of the 1930s and 1940s. I argue that it was during the years of the Great Depression, when laissez-faire capitalism was most discredited, that a group of conservative academics and intellectuals began to lay the foundations for its postwar resurgence. Angered by the New Deal, those intellectual activists honed their free market ideology and began to develop a network through which to distribute it. As a result, they began to lay the intellectual and institutional foundation for the conservative movement. This dissertation recovers a number of narratives that reveal the rudimentary makings of a movement. It was during the 1930s and 1940s that economist Henry Simons worked to turn the University of Chicago's economics department into a bastion of free market sentiment; Leonard Read, after a decade of free market advocacy, created the first libertarian think tank, the Foundation for Economic Education, in 1946; legal scholar Roscoe Pound, worried by the spread of legal realism in the academy and growth of government in Washington, dramatically moved to the political right to make common cause with conservatives; Albert Jay Nock, his protégé Frank Chodorov and Felix Morley created a network of conservative writers and publications that paved the way for William F. Buckley's National Review ; and writers such as Rose Wilder Lane and Isabel Paterson made the case for laissez-faire in the pages of popular publications such as the Saturday Evening Post and the New York Herald Tribune . Historians have generally attributed the rise of the modern right to the conservative political mobilization in response to the civil rights movement, campus agitation of the 1960s, and the campaign for women's rights. As a result, historians tend to view the modern conservative movement as a distinctly postwar social and political phenomenon. This dissertation enriches that account by revealing the ties the modern conservative movement has to the years of the Great Depression and the debate over the government's role in the economy.Item In the light of Kolko: the establishment of the Bureau of Corporations(1969) Bryan, Patricia Elaine; Matusow, Allen J.Gabriel Kolko's thesis, that the period from 1900 to 1916 was marked by the triumph of conservatism rather than reform, challenges traditional historical understanding of Progressivism. According to Kolko, business control over politics rather than attempts to democratize the economy via political means was the significant phenomenon of the Progressive Era. Federal intervention in the economy was undertaken frequently in response to the needs and demands of the industries to be regulated. Because they too were conservative, political leaders cooperated with representatives of business and finance in order to guarantee the preservation of existing social and economic relationships essential to a capitalistic society. "Liberals" were blinded to the truth of the political domination of big business by a "fetish" about the desirability of governmental regulation. The result of this alliance between government and business was the creation of a form of "political capitalism" by means of which economic interests obtained conditions of stability, predictability, and security through the utilization of political outlets. This essay is a case study of Kolko's thesis, concentrating on the establishment of the Bureau of Corporations, the only administrative antitrust measure of any consequence during Theodore Roosevelt's first term in office. In the case of the Bureau, direct business influence was negligible. President Roosevelt chose to support the Nelson amendment, which created the Bureau, instead of a more radical measure primarily for political reasons. He used public opinion to force a reluctant Congress to take action. Liberals who favored a much stronger bill were forced to acquiesce in the passage of the Nelson amendment not because they harbored a fetish about federal regulation of business, but because they feared the public would not understand a note against it. This study reveals that, in the case of the establishment of the Bureau of Corporations, Kolko overestimated the influence of key businessmen and the consensus of values between them and political leaders. He ignored the importance of ideological conflict in the debate over the Bureau and paid too little attention to the role of public opinion and strictly political considerations. Kolko's thesis offers little of value to an understanding of this episode in Progressivism.Item Making the Bible Belt: Preachers, Prohibition, and the Politicization of Southern Religion, 1877-1918(2012-09-05) Locke, Joe; Boles, John B.; Matusow, Allen J.; Emerson, Michael O.; McDaniel, W. CalebH.L. Mencken coined “the Bible Belt” in the 1920s to capture the peculiar alliance of religion and regional life in the American South. But the reality Mencken described was only the closing chapter of a long historical process. Like the label itself, the Bible Belt was something new, and everything new must be made. This dissertation is the history of its making. Over the course of several decades, and in the face of bitter resistance, a complex but shared commitment to expanding religious authority transformed southern evangelicals’ inward-looking restraints into an aggressive, self-assertive, and unapologetic political activism. Late-nineteenth-century religious leaders overcame crippling spiritual anxieties and tamed a freewheeling religious world by capturing denominations, expanding memberships, constructing hierarchies, and purging rivals. Clerics then confronted a popular anticlericalism through the politics of prohibition. To sustain their public efforts, they cultivated a broad movement organized around the assumption that religion should influence public life. Religious leaders fostered a new religious brand of history, discovered new public dimensions for their faith, and redefined religion’s proper role in the world. Clerics churned notions of history, race, gender, and religion into a popular political movement and, with prohibition as their weapon, defeated a powerful anticlerical tradition and injected themselves into the political life of the early-twentieth-century South. By exploring the controversies surrounding religious support for prohibition in Texas, this dissertation recasts the politicization of southern religion, reveals the limits of nineteenth-century southern religious authority, hints at the historical origins of the religious right, and explores a compelling and transformative moment in American history.Item One nation, one world: American clubwomen and the politics of internationalism, 1945--1961(2008) Olsen, Margaret Nunnelley; Matusow, Allen J.Between 1945 and 1961, U.S. clubwomen launched a series of civic campaigns to educate Americans about the United Nations. Drawing on their older traditions of domesticating politics, conservative and liberal clubwomen from around the nation became community-level foreign affairs interpreters. This project explores the ways the foreign affairs activism of four organizations---the General Federation of Women's Clubs, the Daughters of the American Revolution, Women United for the United Nations, and the Minute Women of the U.S.A.---contributed to the popular resonance of foreign affairs in the postwar period and nurtured a growing political divide among American clubwomen. Postwar clubwomen across the political spectrum promoted the idea that women could shape their nation's foreign policy by learning about international affairs. In the process, these women developed competing visions for America's relationship to the world, which they advocated in their community education campaigns. These rival campaigns injected the UN into the everyday lives of American citizens and pitted clubwomen against one another, training a generation of club activists. Beginning with clubwomen's initial support for the United Nations, this project traces the changes in their foreign affairs perspectives and programs over the postwar period. Confronted with the Cold War and the anticolonial movement, conservative clubwomen increasingly billed the UN as a threat to America and sought to police the boundary between the domestic and the foreign, while liberal clubwomen embraced the connection between the two and labeled the UN an agent of both American foreign policy and global peace. Changes in American society, especially the civil rights movement, bled into discussions of foreign affairs, encouraging conservative women to blame internationalism for what they viewed as unwelcome shifts in the status quo and liberal clubs to segregate their foreign affairs work increasingly from controversial domestic reform campaigns. Ultimately, some clubwomen adopted a centrist liberal perspective and some joined a conservative political counterculture. In both cases, foreign affairs work served as postwar clubwomen's political training ground. By positing international awareness as a viable civic project, American women's clubs made the United Nations central to postwar political culture and to their own political identities.Item Reform in the Great Society: The Case of Medicare(Rice University, 1972-10) Matusow, Allen J.; Electronic version made possible with funding from the Rice Historical Society and Thomas R. Williams, Ph.D., class of 2000.Item Southern Landscapes in the City’s Shadow: Environmental Politics and Metropolitan Growth in Texas and Virginia, 1900-1990(2014-04-16) Baker, Andrew C.; Boles, John B.; Matusow, Allen J.; Wittenberg, Gordon; Melosi, Martin V; Hall, Randal LThis dissertation explores the twentieth-century connections between city and countryside within the metropolitan South. Popular myths of suburbanization, reinforced by much of suburban historiography, envision a “crabgrass frontier” inexorably spreading suburbia into a static and defenseless countryside. This myth serves the ends of environmental, slow growth, and open space advocates. It does so, however, by obscuring the transformations, some imposed by the city and some endogenous to the countryside, that reshaped these rural landscapes into metropolitan hinterlands. Highways, airports, reservoirs, and early commuters bound these rural landscapes to the city before the arrival of suburban sprawl. This dissertation uses the histories of two southern metropolitan counties, one outside Houston, Texas, and the other in Northern Virginia, to examine the history of these rural counties as they simultaneously developed into metropolitan hinterlands and countryside, a reflection of urban conceptions of rural life. This project integrates rural, environmental, and agricultural history into the history of the metropolis in a way that calls urban historians to explore the city’s impact beyond suburbia and that challenges rural historians to allow these dynamic metropolitan rural areas to destabilize their larger narrative of a rural America left behind. Additionally, it examines the gentlemen farmers, historical preservationists, and nature-seeking suburbanites who abandoned the city to live in this countryside. These privileged white newcomers formed the vanguard of the anti-growth movement that defined metropolitan fringe politics across the nation. In the rural South, these activists obscured the troubling legacies of racism and rural poverty and celebrated a refashioned landscape whose historical and environmental authenticity served as an implicit critique of the alienation and ugliness of suburbia. Green pastures, historical preservation, horses, and white privilege defined this metropolitan fringe landscape. Using a source base that includes the records of preservation organizations and local, state, and federal government agencies, and oral histories, this project explores the distinct roots of the environmental politics and the shifting relationship between city and country within these southern metropolitan fringe regions.Item The federal response to the problem of crime in America: 1968 to 1972(1982) Walmsley, Andrew Stephen; Matusow, Allen J.; Wiener, Martin; Hyman, Harold M.In the mid-196s, a crime wave of epic proportions was perceived to be sweeping across the United States. The increase in crime, if such an increase took place, was probably due to the greater proportion of young (18 to 24 year olds) people in American society. The statistical evidence, upon which the perception of rising crime rested however, was extremely unreliable. Despite calling the problem primarily a local concern, the federal government undertook to address directly the issue of rising crime. Advised by liberal, sociologically oriented criminologists, the Johnson administration began a program of federal spending aimed at creating more legitimate opportunities through which would-be delinquents could express themselves in a less anti-social manner. During the passage of the legislation, conservative Congressmen, influenced by the public violence and hysteria of 1967 and 1968, attached non-liberal, more overtly punitive, provisions to the measure. In operation, the act proved to be an expensive and wasteful failure. Crime increased steadily from 1968 to 1972 despite the program. Money was either hoarded by local bodies, or spent hastily on projects the efficacy-of which as far as reducing the incidence of crime was concerned was never proven.Item The Spirit in Black and White: Early Twentieth-Century Pentecostals and Race Relations, 1905-1945(2013-12-03) Hamilton, Blaine; Boles, John B.; Matusow, Allen J.; Pinn, Anthony B.This dissertation is a study of the influence of American racial ideology upon the formation of several Pentecostal organizations in the early twentieth century. While America’s major denominations were racially segregated just after the Civil War, these Pentecostal groups emerged at a moment in which American society was still deciding how to address the contact and conflict between different races. Racial segregation was not a settled issue at the turn of the century and Pentecostals were forced to choose whether they would accept the principles of segregation or resist by forming interracial religious communities. The project examines four different organizations, the Apostolic Faith Movement, the Azusa Street Mission, the Church of God in Christ and the Assemblies of God, which stretch from Tennessee to California, exploring their response to racial segregation and white supremacy. Each of these Pentecostal groups developed their own unique response to racial segregation. These reactions to segregation reflected the racial makeup of the organization, the surrounding society’s endorsement of segregation, and the willingness of the leadership to confront racial inequalities. Whereas previous scholarship on Pentecostalism focused primarily on denominational records and religious periodicals, resources concerned with mainly doctrinal and theological issues, this study examines newspapers and public documents from across the United States to uncover the public perception of these organizations. These sources frequently reflected on the interracial cooperation and racial ideology of these organizations, information that was absent from the denominational materials. In some instances, Pentecostals challenged the trend towards racial segregation by conducting racially integrated revivals and Bible schools or incorporating racial diversity into their denominational leadership. On other occasions, Pentecostals chose social acceptance and respectability over integration, establishing racially segregated institutions. This project provides new insights into the development of racial segregation in American society and the role of religious organizations in its development, both in resisting and acquiescing to the principles of segregation.Item Toward a nuclear strategy: Eisenhower and the challenge of Soviet power, 1952-1956(1992) Taylor, Matthew D.; Matusow, Allen J.Dwight D. Eisenhower assumed the presidency convinced that atomic weapons should be employed as essentially conventional tools for war and diplomacy. Supported by the lessons of the Korean War, a conservative fiscal philosophy, advances in nuclear weapons technology, and an asymmetrical conception of containment, that conviction led Eisenhower to formulate a strategic vision that depended primarily upon nuclear weapons for deterring and fighting both general and limited war. During his first term, however, the President's views on nuclear weapons and, thus, U.S. national security strategy, underwent a significant evolution. Although U.S. national security policy, military force structure, and war plans remained firmly based on nuclear weapons, by 1956 Eisenhower's readiness to fulfill the military logic of his "New Look" strategy had all but disappeared. Focusing on decision-making at the highest level, this dissertation describes and explains the evolution of Eisenhower's nuclear outlook, paying particular attention to the mistaken estimates of Soviet capabilities and intentions, and the hypothesis of American vulnerability, which fueled that evolution.Item With hesitant resolve: Arkansas moves toward secession and war(1979) Woods, James; Vandiver, Frank E.; Higginbotham, S. W.; Matusow, Allen J.This work surveys the history of ante-bellum Arkansas until the passage of the Ordinance of Secession on May 6, 1861. The first three chapters deal with the social, economic, and political development of the state prior to 186. Arkansas experienced difficult, yet substantial .social and economic growth during the ante-belium era; its percentage of population increase outstripped five other frontier states in similar stages of development. Its growth was nevertheless hampered by the unsettling presence of the Indian territory on its western border, which helped to prolong a lawless stage. An unreliable transportation system and a ruinous banking policy also stalled Arkansas's economic progress. On the political scene a family dynasty controlled state politics from 183 to 186, a situation without parallel throughout the ante-bellum South. A major part of this work concentrates upon Arkansas's politics from 1859 to 1861. In a most important state election in 186, the dynasty met defeat through an open revolt from within its ranks led by a shrewd and ambitious Congressman, Thomas Hindman. Hindman turned the contest into a class conflict, portraying the dynasty's leadership as "aristocrats" and "Bourbons." Because of Hindman's support, Arkansans chose its first governor not hand-picked by the dynasty. By this election the people handed gubernatorial power to an ineffectual political novice during a time oi great sectional crisis. In the Presidential race of 186, Hindman and the dynasty joined in an uneasy alliance to carry Arkansas for Breckinridge, the most radical southern candidate. In voting for Breckinridge, the state expressed its belief in slavery and its legitimate expansion into the territories. With Lincoln's election, the question of secession rearranged traditional political alignments , and a geo-political division between a secessionist southeastern Arkansas against a Unionist northwestern region emerged. These new alignments became evident in February, 1861, with the election of delegates to the Secession Convention. So heated did these geo-political differences become that there was talk of splitting Arkansas in half. Until Fort Sumter the state refused to secede, but once war became inevitable, Arkansas's cultural, geographical, economic, and political ties to the South proved too strong to ignore. Arkansas became the ninth state to secede from the Union on May 6, 1861. While narrating Arkansas's political history until secession, particular attention is given the regional, racial, and class antagonisms present within the state during the great national crisis of 186-61.