Social Reformers and Regulation: The Prohibition of Cigarettes in the U.S. and Canada

The apogee of anti-smoking legislation in North America was reached early in the last century. In 1903, the Canadian Parliament passed a resolution prohibiting the manufacture, importation, and sale of cigarettes. Around the same time, fifteen states in the United States banned the sale of cigarettes and thirty-five states considered prohibitory legislation. In both the United States and Canada, prohibition was part of a broad political, economic, and social coalition termed the Progressive Movement. Cigarette prohibition was special interest regulation, though not of the usual narrow neoclassical genre; it was the means by which a group of crusaders sought to alter the behavior of a much larger segment of the population. The opponents of cigarette regulation were cigarette smokers and the more organized cigarette lobby. An active Progressive Movement was the necessary condition for generating interest in prohibition, while the anti-prohibition forces played a more significant role later in the legislative process. The moral reformers' succeeded when they faced little opposition because few constituents smoked and/or no jobs were at stake because there was no cigarette industry. In other words, reform is easy when you are preaching to the converted.

Who Should Govern Congress? Access to Power and the Salary Grab of 1873

We examine the politics of the %u201CSalary Grab%u201D of 1873, legislation that increased congressional salaries retroactively by 50 percent. A group of New England and Midwestern elites opposed the Salary Grab, along with congressional franking and patronage-based civil service appointments, as part of reform effort to reshape %u201Cwho should govern Congress.%u201D Our analyses of congressional voting confirm the existence of this non-party elite coalition. While these elites lost many legislative battles in the short-run, their efforts kept reform on the legislative agenda throughout the late-nineteenth century and ultimately set the stage for the Progressive movement in the early-twentieth century.

Coercion, Culture and Debt Contracts: The Henequen Industry in Yucatan, Mexico, 1870-1915

While most contemporary historians agree that the use of debt peonage as a coercive labor contract in Mexico was not widespread, scholars still concur that it was important and pervasive in Yucatan state during the henequen boom of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The henequen boom concurred with the long rule of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1910), under whose watch property rights were reallocated through land laws, and Mexico’s economy became much more closely tied to the United States. In the Yucatan, the accumulation of debts by peons rose as hacendados sought to attract and bond workers to match the rising U.S. demand for twine. We examine the institutional setting in which debt operated and analyze the specific functions of debt: who got it, what form it took, and why it varied across workers. We stress the formal and informal institutional contexts within which hacendados and workers negotiated contracts.

Big Business and the State: Historical Transitions and Corporate Transformation, 1880s 1990s. By Harland Prechel. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. xvi, 317. 75.50,cloth;75.50, cloth; 25.95, paper.

The history of the modern corporation is the history of institutional change and of the corporation s attempt to influence and respond to that change. In this book, Harland Prechel supplies a multilayered analysis of the development of big business from the 1880s to the 1990s. Prechel s approach is to draw linkages between the micro (individual managers), meso (corporate), and macro (institutional) levels of behavior and change. This multilayered analysis allows Prechel to expose the connections and also the inherent irrationalities between each layer of decision making.

STATE PROMOTION AND REGULATION OF THE TELEGRAPH INDUSTRY, 1845 1860

Construction on the first commercial telegraph line in the United States began in 1845. Over the next 15 years, states promoted and regulated the industry through a variety of statutes. This article explores the patterns of telegraph legislation over time and across states. The patterns of telegraph legislation are shown to fit general regulatory patterns of economic activity during the nineteenth century.