John A. Fliter's "Child Labor in America"

John A. Fliter is associate professor of political science at Kansas State University. He is the coauthor of Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Child Labor in America: The Epic Legal Struggle to Protect Children, and reported the following:

From page 99:

On August 21, 1918, representatives from the American Federation of Labor, National Child Labor Committee, Women’s Trade Union League, National Consumers’ League, and various government officials who were responsible for enforcing the Keating-Owen Act met to draft a new child labor bill. The committee had decided early on not to seek a constitutional amendment but to find some path under the enumerated powers of Congress and Supreme Court precedents. The Kenyon postal bill was promptly rejected because there were too many questions over using the postal service as a federal police power and implementation would be difficult. Several of the pending tax bills were also found unsatisfactory. After numerous meetings and discussions, the group coalesced around a plan to levy an excise tax upon the products of any mill, cannery, workshop, factory, or manufacturing establishment in which children under the age of fourteen were employed, or children between fourteen and sixteen years had worked more than eight hours in any day, or more than six days a week. President Wilson approved the proposed legislation, and it was submitted to Senator Pomerene with the recommendation that it be attached to a pending revenue bill.

On page 99 of my book, I discuss how Progressive Era reformers sought a new strategy to curb child labor exploitation after the Supreme Court struck down the first federal law, the Keating-Owen Act, in Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918). In a closely divided opinion, the Court held that Congress could not regulate child labor under its constitutional authority over interstate commerce because local labor conditions were the responsibility of the states.

Some states had restricted child labor since the 1840s but many of the laws were weak and lacked enforcement mechanisms. By the early 1900s, reformers lobbied for tougher, uniform regulations using federal power. Unfortunately, page 99 doesn’t include any compelling quotes or anecdotes, but it represents an important stage in the decades-long struggle to end oppressive child labor through national legislation.

When the tax measure was submitted to Congress, Senators Atlee Pomerene, Irvine Lenroot, and William Kenyon jointly revised the bill. First, instead of taxing products made with child labor, they imposed an excise tax on the profits of companies that used child workers. Second, responsibility for enforcement was given to the commissioner of internal revenue rather than the Labor Department. The senators believed that their strategy strengthened the bill against any constitutional challenges.

The Child Labor Tax, as the provision was called, passed by huge majorities in both chambers of Congress as part of a massive revenue bill. Most reformers, politicians, and even business owners anticipated that the Supreme Court would uphold the law. During the nearly three years it was enforced, many employers stopped using child workers. The Supreme Court, however, struck down the tax law in Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Company (1922).

The rest of my book chronicles the subsequent legal battles over oppressive child labor in America. With the adverse decisions in Hammer and Bailey, reformers turned to amending the Constitution to give Congress the explicit enumerated power to regulate child labor. An amendment was passed in 1924 but the measure failed ratification in the states. A third attempt to restrict child labor under the National Industrial Recovery Act as part of FDR’s New Deal was also struck down by the Supreme Court.

The final victory over child labor was not achieved until the Supreme Court upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act in U.S. v. Darby Lumber (1941). By that time, however, the worst forms of child labor exploitation had ended. It’s fair to conclude that the Supreme Court was not a catalyst for social change on the issue of child labor.

Learn more about Child Labor in America at the University Press of Kansas website.

--Marshal Zeringue

David R. Coon's "Turning the Page"

David R. Coon is an associate professor of media studies at the University of Washington Tacoma. He is the author of Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television.

Coon applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Turning the Page: Storytelling as Activism in Queer Film and Media, and reported the following:

From page 99:

While many spy stories feature a heteronormative relationship to provide romantic tension and ultimate closure, D.E.B.S. foregrounds a lesbian relationship, placing lesbians at the center of a genre where they have traditionally been excluded. Meanwhile, heterosexual men, usually the drivers of this genre, are relegated to the roles of expendable henchmen, emphasizing the film’s effort to rewrite the frequently exclusionary espionage narrative so as to open up possibilities for a more inclusive genre.

Turning the Page examines the work of LGBTQ storytellers in film and television over the past couple decades, paying particular attention to how these acts of storytelling advance the social justice efforts of various LGBTQ communities. Early sections of the book talk about the harmful narratives that have oppressed queer people for generations and how counter-storytelling is an important step toward combating the damage done by the myths and lies that have long portrayed queer people as sick, deviant criminals. Page 99 is about midway through chapter 3, which focuses on POWER UP, a nonprofit educational organization and media production company dedicated to training women and queer filmmakers while producing high quality LGBTQ-oriented content. Using POWER UP as an example, the chapter considers the importance of various kinds of education, including training people in a field that has traditionally excluded them and challenging what audiences think they know by offering new narratives that reimagine possibilities for queer people.

Page 99 is part of a discussion of two short films produced by POWER UP – D.E.B.S. and Little Black Boot. These films provide new takes on familiar genres by incorporating queer characters and relationships into a comedic spy thriller and a modern spin on the fairy tale Cinderella. The page includes a still image from D.E.B.S., featuring a young woman named Max, played by out lesbian actress Tammy Lynn Michaels, with a gun in each hand, shooting at her enemies while working to rescue a fellow spy who has been kidnapped.

The image and discussion on this page feed into the book’s larger arguments by providing examples of films that reimagine possibilities for queer people by rewriting familiar narratives in more inclusive ways. Like many of the films and organizations discussed throughout the book, those covered on page 99 engage in counter-storytelling as a way of challenging the restrictive narratives that have long supported the oppression of LGBTQ people.

Learn more about Turning the Page at the Rutgers University Press website.

Writers Read: David R. Coon.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lynn Hunt's "History: Why It Matters"

Lynn Hunt is Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA and the author of numerous popular and scholarly history books.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, History: Why it Matters, and reported the following:

Since History: Why It Matters is very short (115 pages of text), page 99 comes near the end, in a chapter titled “History’s Future.” The page makes two key points and makes them efficiently, which is, I hope, one of the best characteristics of this book. At this moment in the final chapter, I am discussing the question of time and history. History is obviously about time, right? Not as much as you might think. Writers of history tend to take time for granted, which means that they take the secularization of time for granted. History is about people acting in the profane world. Yet the sacred has not disappeared. It has migrated, for example, from the idea found in many cultures that rulers are rulers by divine right (they are chosen by a god or gods) to the idea that the nation itself is sacred. This is why history textbooks and historical monuments have aroused such controversy; tearing them down, whether literally or figuratively, seems to some people like sacrilege, a violation of the sacred, whether it’s the nation or a cause. My second point, also about time, concerns the recent effort among historians to push history writing much further back in time. When history emerged as a university discipline in the 19th century, scholars assumed that history began with the advent of writing, about 3500-3000 BCE. This conveniently matched the traditional Biblical chronology which held that the world was created sometime around 4000 BCE. After the findings of geology in the 1800s extended the timeline much further back (now billions of years back), historians did not follow. By linking history to writing, they kept the old chronology. Historians are not going to turn into archaeologists or anthropologists but more attention to this longer timeline gives us a different perspective on the past. I argued, consequently, that history needs all kinds of timelines, from the longest to the shortest, in order to make sense of the past. It all depends on the question posed. These are just two of the ways in which history matters and in which our notion of history is changing.

Learn more about Lynn Hunt and Why History Matters.

The Page 99 Test: Writing History in the Global Era.

Writers Read: Lynn Hunt.

--Marshal Zeringue

Victoria M. Grieve's "Little Cold Warriors"

Victoria M. Grieve is Associate Professor of History at Utah State University and the author of The Federal Art Project and The Creation of Middlebrow Culture. Her research spans childhood studies, visual culture, and cultural politics from the New Deal to the Cold War.

Grieve applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Little Cold Warriors: American Childhood in the 1950s, and reported the following:

From page 99:

…Their exchange reveals another persistent struggle at the heart of the Franklin enterprise, as well as Cold War cultural propaganda more generally. The USIA aimed to change hearts and minds through direct propaganda to a mainstream audience, but USIA-sponsored intellectuals tended to have a longer view and a subtler approach. Franklin operated on the principle that an educated population that enjoyed positive relationships with US-supported institutions and that did not appear to have ulterior motives would be stronger allies in the long term. Smith’s memos and reports repeatedly tout “the political benefits of a non-political book program” to justify Franklin’s title selections, target audiences, and juvenile book projects to the USIA.

Page 99 is about halfway through Little Cold Warriors, in the middle of Chapter Three, and happens to emphasize perhaps the key assertion of the book. At this point, I’m discussing a book program launched by private concerns in the United States but funded by the U.S. State Department. There are, of course, some different priorities at work which soon become points of contention. Should the bookmen emphasize America’s best literature, or should they translate books that paint the U.S. in a favorable light? State Department bureaucrats argue that the use of taxpayer money and Cold War politics demand the latter approach.

But Datus Smith, the head of Franklin Books, argues that “the political benefits of a nonpolitical book program” will in the long run do more to bolster the image of the United States in sensitive regions of the world. By translating juvenile books into Arabic, for example, Franklin Books cultivated a positive image with the next generation of leaders and built mutual relationships of trust and goodwill.

Of course, even Franklin’s “nonpolitical” books were political. I point out on page 99 that one of Franklin’s first and most popular translations from its Cairo, Egypt office was Edward R. Murrow’s This I Believe (1953). Franklin’s adaptation featured the biographies of 25 notable Americans and 25 prominent Arabs, the selection of which required the identification of particular national traits.

Page 99 offers one example of the larger argument of the book – the assumption that children of the 1950s were “nonpolitical” allowed children and children’s culture, such as juvenile books, to be used in explicitly political ways to fight the Cold War. Children’s toys, art exchange programs, advertising, and school civil defense projects all relied on the same assumption.

Learn more about Little Cold Warriors at the Oxford University Press.

--Marshal Zeringue

Rory Cormac's "Disrupt and Deny"

Rory Cormac is an Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham. A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a leading expert among a new generation of intelligence historians, he specialises in British covert operations and the secret pursuit of foreign policy. He has published widely on intelligence and security issues and regularly appears on radio and television. He is the co-author of The Black Door: Spies, Secret Intelligence and British Prime Ministers and featured on Channel 4's Spying on the Royals.

Cormac applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy, and reported the following:

It’s early 1953 and Operation Boot, the covert action to overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister, is dead.

Britain had been waging subversion and political action to undermine Prime Minister Mossadeq and lay the foundations for a coup as early as the autumn of 1951. The Foreign Office simply could not tolerate his nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, a vital source of income for a British government still suffering the disastrous economic legacy of the Second World War.

Page 99 of Disrupt and Deny details how, after 18 months of planning, bribing and planting propaganda in the press, British officials entered one of their periodic episodes of cold feet and called the whole thing off.

Taking the page in isolation is both characteristic of the wider book and misleading. The wavering outlined on this page is temporary, albeit reflective of broader Foreign Office caution about using covert action. Time and again, military and intelligence officers expressed deep frustration at what they saw as Foreign Office wetness. Yet, the page is misleading in so far as the chapter from which it is taken actually reveals the integral British role in the eventual overthrow. It tells the story of how Britain made the running on the operation, lobbied the United States to join them, and, despite some division in London, provided support for the chaotic coup. The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was thrilled.

Operation Boot is a central episode in the broader history of Britain’s unacknowledged interference in the affairs of others, known as covert action.

First, the perceived success inspired a wave of planning for similar operations across the Middle East.

Second, the episode reveals the stark differences between covert action in this region and that undertaken against the Soviets in Europe (the topic of earlier chapters). Here, MI6 used small scale – if devious – disruptive operations, designed to chip away and gradually undermine Soviet authority. By stark contrast, operations targeting nationalism in the Middle East were free to be far more ambitious and dangerous.

From 1945, successive prime ministers turned to spies and special forces to mask decline and influence the fate of nations in a deniable manner. It is still happening today. The 1953 coup in Iran was just one example.

Learn more about Disrupt and Deny at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Loeffler's "Rooted Cosmopolitans"

James Loeffler is Jay Berkowitz Professor of Jewish History at the University of Virginia and former Robert A. Savitt Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

The recent news that the United States has withdrawn from the UN Human Rights Council alarmed many and pleased others. But it surprised no one. For several decades now, successive American administrations have shared an ambivalent relationship with the UN’s international human rights system. The stated reason is frustration with the explicit politicization of human rights. A UN system intended to be a neutral, apolitical body has morphed in the hands of dictators and autocrats into a propaganda weapon directed against the U.S. and its allies, particularly Israel. Even those who think Israel’s human rights record warrants UN scrutiny generally recognize that the Human Rights Council is highly vulnerable to political bias.

Could it have turned out differently? That is the question I discuss on Page 99 of my book, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Jews and Human Rights in the Twentieth Century. The founding father of international human rights law, Hersch Zvi Lauterpacht, thought long and hard in the 1940s about how to build a better system of international law that would transcend the dangers of geopolitics. As a Polish-born Jew who helped build the Zionist movement in interwar England and Palestine, he understood that politics and justice were intimately related. He watched in despair as the elaborate League of Nations legal system designed to protect Jews failed to stop the Holocaust.

Still, Lauterpacht hoped that after World War II further atrocities and other harms could be prevented if the world embraced a truly independent, universal human rights system. To succeed, that UN program would require two things: more power and more impartiality. Its officials would need real legal enforcement authority. Along with that, human rights at the UN must be fully insulated from geopolitics.

On Page 99, I describe Lauterpacht’s impassioned efforts to win the British and the American governments over to this vision. In a way, that theme runs throughout the entire book. Lauterpacht formed part of an activist network of Jewish pragmatic idealists who struggled both to make human rights effective and to shield them from the inevitable geopolitical intrigues and glaring hypocrisies that constitute a permanent feature of international diplomacy. Already in the 1940s they learned to their dismay that this was easier said than done. 70 years later, we still grapple with the same dilemma: How can we reset the balance between law and politics for human rights?

Learn more about Rooted Cosmopolitans at the Yale University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tanya Katerí Hernández's "Multiracials and Civil Rights"

Tanya Katerí Hernández is the Archibald R. Murray Professor of Law at Fordham University School of Law, where she co-directs the Center on Race, Law & Justice as its Head of Global and Comparative Law Programs and Initiatives.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is like some numerical sorcery from a Jorge Luis Borges story, mythical and unfathomable yet accurate all at the same time. On page 99 of Multiracials and Civil Rights: Mixed-Race Stories of Discrimination, I describe how the U.S. government refused to add a “multiracial” category to its list of racial categories on the decennial census form in 1997, and instead started permitting respondents to select as many racial categories apply to their racial identity. The page then notes that the most zealous of multiracial category proponents were not satisfied by this government method of enumerating the population of racially mixed residents “because multiple box checking does not directly promote a distinct multiracial identity.” Page 99’s insight into the entire book though is revealed in the assessment that the significance of the census racial category debate:

extends beyond the actual decision of how mixed-race persons should be counted. What is most salient is how the struggles over the census racial categories have fostered a discourse of exalting personal racial identity and characterizing any incursions on expressions of personal identity as a civil rights issue in of itself absent any mixed-race specific material inequality.

The entire book is about interrogating the premise that mixed-race people have racial equality concerns that are not readily addressed by civil rights laws crafted with white versus black discrimination solely in mind. However, after examining the narratives of multiracial-identified persons bringing claims of racial discrimination across the contexts of employment, education, housing, public accommodations, and criminal justice, I found that at the core of each claim was the all too familiar binary of white versus non-white bias.

It turns out that apart from the distinction of articulating a multiracial personal identity, the stories of racial discrimination themselves are not unique and certainly not a cause for questioning the architecture of civil rights laws already under attack by those who are convinced that racial discrimination is no longer a concern that the government should be bothered with. Anti-discrimination law compels judges to concentrate on how claimants are treated rather than how they personally identify. The take away is that the public activism for cultural recognition of a multiracial identity is a misplaced import into the legal context because it obstructs the ability to understand the needs of multiracial victims of discrimination, whose disadvantage clearly flows from white versus non-white group-based racial hierarchies.

Learn more about Multiracials and Civil Rights at the NYU Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Racial Subordination in Latin America.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Tuckett's "Rules, Paper, Status"

Anna Tuckett is Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Tuckett applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy falls at the beginning of the chapter titled “Becoming an Immigration Adviser”. This chapter focuses on the emergence of self-styled immigration experts – or “community brokers” – who help migrants navigate Italian immigration bureaucracy. These brokers have various motives for their assistance work, but one shared outcome is that their brokerage activities enable these individuals to fashion themselves in particular ways. These include fulfilling desires to be professional, gaining standing in their community, satisfying charitable impulses, and fighting for social justice. Crucially, the role of the community broker offers possibilities for gaining social status that are generally not otherwise available to migrants in Italy. For example, by translating documents, interpreting at offices, and filling out basic applications, Mehdi, a Moroccan community broker, was able to eke out a basic living for himself and avoid employment as a fruit picker or other similarly poorly paid wage labor.

The emergence of community brokers goes to the heart of my book’s focus on the productive nature of migrants’ legal and bureaucratic encounters and the unintended consequences these produce. In Italy, migrants generally have very low social and economic status and are restricted to the lowest status and most poorly remunerated jobs. Italian immigration law, which ties legal status to employment, effectively traps migrants in these positions, and is therefore a key factor in their marginalization in Italian society. As I argue in this chapter, however, although immigration bureaucracies function as a mechanism that reproduces migrants’ continued precarity, these brokers are able to turn this mechanism on its head, using immigration bureaucracy as a tool to overcome such marginalization and create alternative career opportunities for themselves. In doing so, they broaden their life horizons in spite of a legal and institutional matrix that is stacked against them.

Learn more about Rules, Paper, Status at the Stanford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gabriela González's "Redeeming La Raza"

Gabriela González is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Redeeming La Raza: Transborder Modernity, Race, Respectability, and Rights, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Leonor Villegas de Magnón had two powerful reasons for getting involved in this conflict. First, she knew that the American soldiers would turn the men over to the Federales in Nuevo Laredo once they had recuperated, after which they would be either imprisoned or executed in Mexico. Second, she was committed to the Carrancista cause. She knew that the rebel army needed survivors to fight other battles.

Page 99 focuses on transborder activist Leonor Villegas de Magnón’s heroic efforts to save the lives of injured Mexican rebel soldiers during the Mexican Revolution. The soldiers, followers of revolutionary general Venustiano Carranza, had been struck down during the 1914 Battle of Nuevo Laredo. Villegas de Magnon’s humanitarian work involved receiving the fallen Carrancista soldiers ferried across the Rio Grande river to the safety of the south Texas community of Laredo; housing them in makeshift hospitals; and with a group of nurses and doctors, nursing these battle survivors back to health.

Federalist officials connected to the regime of Mexican dictator Victoriano Huerta demanded that the United States release these men to their custody, ensuring that they would either be imprisoned or executed upon returning to Mexico. The rest of the page highlights the ingenious ways in which Villegas de Magnón addressed the transnational realities of trying to protect the human rights of the injured men in the face of an international neutrality law that compelled American officials to acquiesce to the demands of the Huerta regime.

This one story, like many others in Redeeming la Raza, encapsulates the main argument that during the first half of the twentieth century, Mexican American and Mexican immigrant activists in Texas and northern Mexico created a transborder political culture that challenged the more exploitative aspects of modernity and sought to build movements for human and civil rights. On the American side, la raza (ethnic Mexicans--both U.S. born and immigrants) needed to be redeemed or saved from white supremacy and all the exploitative systems informed by racialist thinking. In Mexico, modernity had been ushered in by Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz and the American and European investors he made deals with over the course of his thirty years in power. Mexico’s economic development came at a high social cost, leading to revolution.

The work of revolution in Mexico, like the work of civil and human rights activism in Texas fell not just on the shoulders of men, but also many women, including the women of the White Cross, a medical brigade founded by Leonor Villegas de Magnón. For Villegas de Magnón, helping the injured rebel soldiers was both a humanitarian act and a political one, for she supported the revolution’s attempt to redeem la raza in Mexico by ridding the country of anti-democratic, dictatorial forces.

Learn more about Redeeming La Raza at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew S. Reynolds's "The Third Lens"

Andrew S. Reynolds is professor of philosophy at Cape Breton University. He has published in various history and philosophy of science journals and is the author of Peirce’s Scientific Metaphysics: The Philosophy of Chance, Law, and Evolution.

Reynolds applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Third Lens: Metaphor and the Creation of Modern Cell Biology, and reported the following:

I tried the page 99 test with my book and the results came back indisputably negative. Page 99 of my book on the role of metaphors in cell biology consists of a figure representing gene expression patterns in various types of cells during skeletal development that takes up 75% of the page. This would not give a very accurate idea of what the book is about and would probably turn off all but developmental or cell biologists, when in fact it’s about how scientists use metaphors as a kind of conceptual tool to understand and to physically manipulate cells (and their molecular components) –and how these metaphors can in turn manipulate the scientists if they’re not careful. Finally the book asks the question (and offers an answer), What does the fact that science relies so significantly on language that is literally untrue (metaphor) mean for our philosophical understanding of how science helps us to know about the world and ourselves?

Learn more about The Third Lens at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue