Editor’s Note

This issue of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era is, in many ways, about the imagination.Specifically, the articles examine how turn-of-the-century Americans perceived their place within a rapidly changing world and, in turn, projected their visions as a means to gain power or wealth, promote dubious economic policies, and advance moral causes.In the first article, "Teddy's Bear Country: Imagining Wild Nature in Theodore Roosevelt's America," Malcolm McLaughlin reminds us that few Americans encountered real bears in the early twentieth century.But as bears became symbolic of a wild world that appeared to be passing, sportsmen and journalists turned the creatures into a consumer commodity.The bearskin rug seemed to tame nature and make it suitable for the domestic realm.Meanwhile, Theodore Roosevelt's association with hunting prompted Americans to picture a forward-looking nation that was nevertheless comfortably rooted in a strenuous past.Similarly, Benjamin Wise's "Downfall Voyeurism: Jazz Dancing and the Making of Moral Concern in America" shows how conservative Americans in the 1910s (and beyond) strove to imagineand to capitalize uponthe moral depravity they associated with jazz dancing.It was not enough for preachers and patriarchs to condemn new cultural forms.Rather, they had to provide readers and listeners with vicarious enjoyment, to make them feel the cultural danger.This was an incredibly modern way of reacting against modernity, and of claiming to preserve traditional morals.Indeed, many Americans sought protection in times of great change.As James Patrick Breen argues in "A Menace to Free Labor: Anti-Catholicism, the American Protective Association, and Working-Class Formation in Gilded Age America," the American Protective Association stirred the imagination of native-born, Protestant Americans who feared they might lose their jobs, or even their freedoms, because of Catholics supposedly beholden to Rome.Tales of slave labor and "papist" automatons were fanciful, but lack of substance did not prevent some labor leaders from using such narratives in a persistent, and xenophobic, quest to protect the nation from outside forces.Fritz Kusch, meanwhile, focuses our attention upon the debate regarding tariffs in "Picturing Protectionism: The Tariff Question in Protectionist Cartoon Propaganda in the United States, 1894-1909."Pro-tariff groups used cartoons to inspire Americans to imagine the benefits of economic protectionism.In these visual images, anti-tariff politicians were dastardly saboteurs, while President William McKinley was an American hero.(Sometimes, truly, the present mimics the past in strange and unexpected ways.)In the Gilded Age imagination, tariffs were not just taxes.Rather, they were dikes that retained threatening floodwaters, or fences that protected livestock from poachers.Tariffs, such cartoons promised, filled the proverbial dinner pail.Who needed to understand the messy and complicated realities of economic policy when propagandists could simply produce images abundant with metaphors of industry and prosperity?