Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier's "Imprisoned by the Past"

Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier is a Professor of Law at the City University of New York School of Law. He is the author of several law review articles on issues including criminal procedure, constitutional law, U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence, and capital punishment.

Kirchmeier applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Imprisoned by the Past: Warren McCleskey and the American Death Penalty, and reported the following:

Imprisoned by the Past examines the history of the U.S. death penalty from colonial times to modern day, connecting that history to the case of Warren McCleskey where the Supreme Court considered how race affects capital sentencing. In that case, the Court held that even if there were a significant risk that the race of the victim affected death sentences, that finding did not violate the U.S. Constitution.

McCleskey’s case played a pivotal role in the history of capital punishment for a number of reasons. For example, the Court’s decision remains a landmark example of the country’s failure to address race issues.

Another reason McCleskey’s case is a centerpiece of the book is that it was a turning point for how lawyers, judges, activists, and others view capital punishment. His 1987 case was the last time that the Supreme Court realistically might have ended the death penalty, following after the Court struck down the death penalty in 1972 and then upheld new death penalty statutes in 1976.

Page 99 of the book in Chapter 8 (“A New Era”) discusses those 1976 cases where the Court allowed the death penalty to return. In a sense, page 99 does not reveal the expanse of Imprisoned by the Past because the book traces the history of the American death penalty across centuries as well as the role that race plays in the criminal justice system.

But on the other hand, page 99 does reveal a core theme of the book. Gregg v. Georgia and other cases on page 99 discuss the Court’s struggles with the arbitrariness of the system. The Gregg Court considered whether new statutes had eliminated the arbitrariness of distinguishing those sentenced to death from those sentenced to prison. And the Court found that some of the new statutes had satisfactorily curtailed the arbitrariness.

More than a decade later, though, McCleskey’s case challenged that conclusion. Although McCleskey lost his case, his evidence later affected several justices who had decided Gregg v. Georgia. By 2008, three of the justices who voted to uphold the death penalty in Gregg had changed their minds, a swing that would have eliminated the death penalty in the U.S. had they changed their minds earlier. But it took decades of evidence, including the studies presented in Warren McCleskey’s case, to persuade them -- too late -- that the death penalty experiment had failed.

Learn more about Imprisoned by the Past: Warren McCleskey and the American Death Penalty at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Brian Fagan's "The Intimate Bond"

Brian Fagan was born in England and spent several years doing fieldwork in Africa. He is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of New York Times bestseller The Great Warming and many other books, including Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World, and several books on climate history, including The Little Ice Age and The Long Summer.

Fagan applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Intimate Bond: How Animals Shaped Human History, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

The sacrificial beast processed to the altar, where a priest would scatter grain upon it and then drink a libation. He would then pour the remainder of the wine between the beast’s horns, some hair from the area being burnt as an offering to the gods. The animal was then stunned before its throat was cut and the carcass disemboweled . . . . Every detail of the ritual had to be absolutely correct, or the ceremony and the sacrifice had to be repeated.

Page 99 of The Intimate Bond comes at the end of a chapter on the symbolic ambiguity that surrounded bulls in ancient times. They were symbols of strong leadership, sacrificed to the gods, yet were a vital source of meat, creating a dilemma for those who revered them. Intimate is a history of the changing relationship between humans and animals that focuses on this ambiguity, so p. 99 is a good jumping off point. Ice Age hunters respected, even revered, their quarry. Then they tamed dogs, followed about 12,000 years ago by pigs, sheep, goats, and then cattle. This was when the relationship began to change from one of partnership and respect to one of exploitation, not only for meat and dairy products, but, later, as load carriers when we tamed pack animals, starting with the donkey. These humble beasts I call the “pickup trucks” of ancient times, which opened the first international trade routes across semi-arid lands in what is now the Middle East. They are the unsung heroes of history, working quietly in the shadows, unlike the horse and the camel, both domesticated somewhat later. Camels opened up the Sahara and worked Eurasia’s Silk Road. Horses annihilated distances on the steppes and brought the Mongols to the frontiers of Europe. The Intimate Bond traces the futile, wasteful history of cavalry warfare, epitomized by the Battle of Waterloo and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and shows how an emerging passion for cats, dogs, and other pets coincided with the rise of campaigns against animal cruelty in Victorian times. The Intimate Bond is a multi-faceted account of our complex, ambivalent relationship with animals that forms the background to the current debates over animal rights. This was a very sobering, often disturbing book to write. And I’ll never look at a donkey the same way again.

Visit Brian Fagan's website.

The Page 99 Test: The Great Warming.

The Page 99 Test: The Attacking Ocean.

Writers Read: Brian Fagan.

--Marshal Zeringue

Margaret Moore's "A Political Theory of Territory"

Margaret Moore is Professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen's University (Canada). She is the author of Foundations of Liberalism and Ethics of Nationalism.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Political Theory of Territory, and reported the following:

Page 99 is not fully representative – it’s a critique of someone else’s account of territory. To be more a more representative page, it would have to articulate my own theory of territory. My theory argues that the right-holding agent (the holder of rights over territory) is the people, and the state is the mechanism by which the people are self-determining. I justify the idea of territory or having territorial rights in terms of the moral value of self-determination.

The book argues in favour of a world divided up in territorial units, as I understand them, both against people who are against territory, and against people who hold a different theory of territory. I apply that theory to a range of problems linked to territory, all of which are now dealt with in an ad hoc way: disputes over natural resources, disputes over boundaries, unoccupied islands, the ocean, the Arctic, and disputes rooted in historic injustice with regard to land; and secessionist conflicts.

Learn more about A Political Theory of Territory at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Shelley Stamp's "Lois Weber in Early Hollywood"

Shelley Stamp is Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A leading expert on women and early film culture, she is author of Movie Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture after the Nickelodeon and founding editor of Feminist Media Histories: An International Journal. Stamp also provides audio commentary for DVDs, curates film programs, and consults on film preservation projects.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Lois Weber in Early Hollywood, and reported the following:

Page 99 features a discussion of The People vs. John Doe, Lois Weber’s 1916 film on capital punishment. Released at the height of a national debate on the death penalty, the film dramatizes the plight of Charles Stielow, an innocent man accused of murder, in order to present an argument against state-sponsored execution. Though all mention of Stielow was removed from the film at the behest of the National Board of Censorship, contemporary reviewers immediately noted the connections between Weber’s anonymous protagonist and the real-life Stielow. Indeed, Universal rushed the film into release after Stielow’s death sentence was commuted and The People vs. John Doe became a rallying point for anti-death-penalty advocates across the country: screenings were presented by abolitionist groups like the Humanitarian Cult and the film was shown to Pennsylvania legislators at a hearing to abolish capital punishment there.

The People vs. John Doe was one of many popular, profitable films that Weber wrote and directed on issues compelling to Americans during the Progressive Era. She tackled poverty and women’s wage equity in Shoes (1916), opium addiction and narcotics trafficking in Hop, the Devil’s Brew (1916), and the fight to legalize birth control in Where Are My Children? (1916) and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1917). She believed cinema was a "voiceless language" capable of presenting weighty topics for a mass audience, a new medium on par with a newspaper's editorial page. Weber, one contemporary observer remarked, fearlessly embraced contentious subjects that “other directors would not touch for fear of condemnation.” She endured her share of censorship battles as a result, but held firm in her commitment to her vision of socially-engaged, popular cinema.

Although she vowed to abandon such “heavy dinners” when she formed her own production company, Weber remained a trenchant critic of social norms. Films like Too Wise Wives (1921) and What Do Men Want? (1921) provoke fundamental questions about capitalism, changing sexual mores, traditional family structures, and a rising culture of consumption in the Jazz Age. The latter film, which features a spectacular scene of a pregnant, unmarried woman committing suicide in public, likely cost Weber her contract with Paramount Pictures. In the late 1920s, when it became increasingly difficult for her to find work, Weber made a trio of films critical of Hollywood’s star-driven glamour industry. She spoke openly of her desire to counter the flappers and vamps who increasingly clouded Hollywood’s imagination – she called them “cute little dolls dressed up in clothes that they do not know how to wear” – with “womanly” protagonists who possessed “brains and character.”

Throughout her career Weber remained a vocal advocate for women in Hollywood, demanding a place at the table when women were excluded from early professional guilds, mentoring many female screenwriters and actresses, decrying the limited roles available for women onscreen, and protesting the growing climate of hostility towards female directors in the 1920s. One of the first celebrity filmmakers, Weber used her renown as “The Greatest Woman Director,” to model female leadership in the fledgling movie business, to foster connections with female professionals and activist clubwomen outside the industry, and to embody an ideal of equality between men and women in the workplace.

Unjustly marginalized in film history, Weber remains a landmark figure, not only for the pioneering role she played as the first woman admitted to the Motion Picture Directors’ Association, but for her enduring commitment to making popular films on compelling, topical issues.

Learn more about Lois Weber in Early Hollywood at Shelley Stamp's webpage and the University of California Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeffrey S. Gurock's "Holocaust Averted"

Jeffrey S. Gurock is the Libby M. Klaperman Professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University. His Jews in Gotham: New York Jews in a Changing City won the 2012 Jewish Book of the Year award from the Jewish Book Council.

Gurock applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938-1967, and reported the following:

I am pleased to report the following:

My page 99 describes a fictional meeting in 1941 between Winston Churchill and Peter Bergson where the militant Zionist proposes the creation of a Jewish army that would fight with the British in that nation’s struggle against the Japanese. Bergson hoped to leverage this offer as a means towards the establishment of Israel in a post-war world. But he was unable to garner American Jewish financial support for his initiative. Jewish leaders were skittish about how their involvement in a war that was not America’s own would play on their country’s isolationist streets.

This episode is but one of hundreds of intriguing scenarios that are at the heart of my counter-factual history of what American Jewish life would have been like had there been no Holocaust and if the U.S. had not been drawn into WWII. Both famous and not so renowned figures are placed in imaginative but compelling roles.

Basing my stories on actual historical documents, but with creative twists, I depict FDR as unsuccessful in attempting to run for a third term. I have Tokyo’s war council outvoting Tojo’s plan to attack Pearl Harbor. On the western European front, the Nazis get bogged down in their struggle against British and French troops and never succeed in invading eastern Europe where more than six million Jews live. The European war ends in 1944 when Hitler is assassinated. Meanwhile as late as 1946, the British are still fighting in Asia. This war-weary nation accepts American assistance in attempting to control a tumultuous Palestine where Jews and Arabs are squaring off. American peace-keepers arrive in 1946 but many are killed during the bombing of the King David Hotel. This provocation—viewed as terrorism in America—stokes anti-Zionist sentiments and American Jews run for cover. Their fear of dual loyalty creates a serious fissure between U.S. Jews and Israelis.

There are many real historical lessons to be learned from these and the many other contemplations that appear in my work. Most poignantly, without the war-time experience where American Jews felt empowered from their recognized role in defeating the Nazis, they would remain frightened about who they were and what they stood for. The roots of contemporary Jewish assertiveness for world Jewry and for social and political causes at home came out of the Holocaust where their brethren suffered. But American Jews emerged from WWII determined that their voices would be heard.

Visit Jeffrey S. Gurock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bruce J. Hillman's "The Man Who Stalked Einstein"

Bruce J. Hillman, MD has distinguished himself as a health services researcher, clinical trialist, and author of both medical articles and short stories published in elite magazines and journals. He is Professor and former Chair of Radiology at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He has published over 300 medical articles, book chapters, and editorials, including his 2010 book for the lay public, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – How Medical Imaging is Changing Health Care (Oxford University Press). Hillman has served as Editor-in-Chief of three medical journals, including his current position with the Journal of the American College of Radiology. He was Deputy Editor of the online literary and humanities journal, Hospital Drive, and has published eight short stories in such journals as The Connecticut Review, Compass Rose, and Aethlon, the Journal of Sports Literature.

Hillman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Man Who Stalked Einstein: How Nazi Scientist Philipp Lenard Changed the Course of History, and reported the following:

The narrative on page 99 of The Man Who Stalked Einstein is an important aside to the main thread of the book. The page intrudes on the deliberations of ‘the small popes of Uppsala’ – the members of the Nobel Prize Committee for Physics. Between 1910 and 1922, the Committee received letters nominating Albert Einstein every year except 1911. Worldwide, he was the best known and most popular scientist of his era, yet the Committee consistently named lesser lights to receive the Prize.

The bias preventing Einstein from receiving the Nobel Prize reflected a Europe-wide battle between traditional experimental physicists like the ‘small popes’ and theoretical physicists like Einstein. The Man Who Stalked Einstein tracks the battle for the soul of physics between Einstein and the arch-experimentalist and 1905 Nobel laureate, Philipp Lenard. Ultimately, Lenard’s attacks on Einstein progressed from the professional to the personal. The narcissistic Lenard envied Einstein’s popularity with the common man. Following the end of World War I, Lenard progressively became more nationalistic and rabidly anti-Semitic, joining the Nazi party well before it was a political necessity. For more than 15 years, he publicly hounded Einstein, calling him a charlatan and his theory of relativity a fraud. Even after Einstein fled Germany in 1933, Lenard continued to depict Einstein and those who espoused his theories as ‘un-German,’ a Jewish stain upon the purity of superior Aryan physics.

In 1921, two of the ‘small popes’ died and were replaced by a theoretical physicist and mathematician, Carl Wilhelm Oseen. The politically astute Oseen managed to broker a deal for three years worth of Nobel Prizes that satisfied everyone on the Committee: the long-overdue 1921 Prize for Einstein, 1922 for the theoretician, Niels Bohr, and 1923 for the experimentalist, Robert Milliken.

Lenard wrote a long, tedious letter condemning the Committee for its inability to think with ‘Aryan clarity,’ but it was too late. For his part, a resentful Einstein proceeded with a planned lecture tour in Japan and skipped the ceremony. The irony of Einstein’s Prize is that the Nobel Assembly specifically noted that the award was not for Einstein’s theory of relativity but for his Law of the Photoelectric Effect, the groundwork for which had been laid by Lenard in the early 1900s.

Lenard became a leading advisor to Hitler and led the dismissal of Jewish professors from German universities. Many of these scientists immigrated to Germany’s enemies. Few remember Lenard’s name, while Einstein became Time Magazine’s Man of the 20th Century.

Visit Bruce J. Hillman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Emma Sky's "The Unraveling"

Emma Sky is a senior fellow at Yale University’s Jackson Institute. She worked in the Middle East for twenty years and was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for her services in Iraq.

Sky applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq, and reported the following:

From page 99 of The Unraveling:

Why did the Iraqi chicken cross the road?

Coalition Provisional Authority:
The fact that the Iraqi chicken crossed the road
affirmatively demonstrates that decision-making
authority has been transferred to the chicken well in
advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of
power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its
own decisions.

Halliburton:
We were asked to help the chicken cross the road.
Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the
rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost the
US government $326,004.

Muqtada al-Sadr:
The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will
be killed.

US Army Military Police:
We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the
road. As part of these preparations, individual
soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then
plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence
of any chicken rights violations.

Peshmerga:
The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to
cross the road, to show its independence and to
transport the weapons it needs to defend itself.
However, in future, to avoid problems, the chicken
will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill.

Page 99 quotes from an email sent around the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in 2004, when the efforts to bring democracy to Iraq had already started to run astray. We were based in Saddam’s Republican Palace, then the headquarters of the CPA, and under regular bombardment. The decision was taken to hand over authority to the Iraqis by 30 June 2004.

It shows how we dealt with the absurdity of our situation through humor.

It depicts how different groups in Iraq see things through different lenses. As such, it is illustrative of the different voices that appear throughout the book.

What page 99 does not show is how The Unraveling interweaves my personal experience with those of Americans and Iraqis who I interacted with across a decade in my role first as the representative of the CPA in Kirkuk and then as Political Advisor to the top US Generals.

Through these vignettes, the reader gains deep insight into the coping strategies of people put in difficult circumstances, the bonds that tie them together, and the world views they possess. In each tale lies a deeper theme.

I was very sad and angry when I left Iraq and wondered what all the sacrifice had been for. I came to realize that I had witnessed key events and had a duty to record them. I believe we honor those who lost their lives by trying to learn the right lessons from the war. I set out to acknowledge the huge efforts of those who strived to give Iraq a chance for a better future and to pay tribute to Iraq, a country that I came so much to love.

Learn more about The Unraveling at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Martin Goldsmith's "Alex's Wake"

Martin Goldsmith, author of Alex's Wake: The Tragic Voyage of the St. Louis to Flee Nazi Germany--and a Grandson's Journey of Love and Remembrance, is the host and classical music programmer for Symphony Hall on Sirius XM Satellite Radio and previously hosted NPR's daily classical music program, "Performance Today," from 1989 to 1999. He is the author of The Inextinguishable Symphony and lives in Maryland.

Goldsmith applied the “Page 99 Test” to Alex's Wake and reported the following:

Page 99 of Alex's Wake lands the reader in the midst of the initial developments that would become infamous as the tragedy of the SS St. Louis in the spring of 1939. A series of improbable events had culminated in more than 900 Jewish refugees being booted out of their native Germany on board one of the world's luxury liners. After a twelve-day voyage that included fine meals and spirited dances with a live orchestra (unfamiliar treatment for those refugees, who had faced increasingly violent discrimination for six years), the St. Louis pulled into Havana harbor and was not allowed to disembark its passengers. What began as a political standoff between Cuban President Federico Laredo Bru and other factions of his government evolved into a shameful episode of American history that chillingly resonates to this day.

The international aspects of the situation and how it would soon involve the U.S. government are right there on Page 99:

At one point in the discussions, Cuban Secretary of State Juan Remos met with President Bru to argue the moral implications of denying asylum to these victims of Nazism and to remind the president that his stance might cost him the disfavor of the United States. Unbeknownst to the secretary, the plight of the St. Louis refugees had indeed become a topic for debate in official American circles, but so far the direction of those discussions did not, in fact, contradict the Cuban president's position. Assistant U.S. Secretary of State George Messersmith wrote in a memorandum that it was his understanding that the United States would not "intervene in a matter of this kind which was purely outside of our sphere and entirely an internal matter of Cuba."

That passage hints at what was to come. Over the next week, as the St. Louis plied the waters off the coast of Florida, the U.S. government concluded that the plight of the 900 refugees was "purely outside of our sphere" of moral responsibility. Policies and mores that were equal parts law, politics, and a polite but lethal anti-semitism led to the "saddest ship afloat today" (in the words of the New York Times) being turned away from our shores and sent back to Europe. Nearly a third of the passengers, including my grandfather Alex and uncle Helmut, would be murdered in concentration camps.

And yet the voyage of the St. Louis is merely the most historically celebrated portion of the long lonely journey of Alex and Helmut, a journey my wife and I retraced in the spring of 2011. Over the course of six weeks and 5,700 miles we stood where they stood, bore witness, and met some extraordinary people along the way. On the final leg of the journey I discovered a means to escape the churning emotional waters of Alex's wake and to set aside the burden of guilt and shame I'd long thought was my emotional inheritance. It seems to have struck a chord with many members of the Second Generation, the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors. At more than one of the many groups of readers I've met, someone has told me, with barely concealed tears, "You've written this book for me."
© 2015 Martin Goldsmith

Visit the Alex's Wake website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Tiffany D. Joseph's "Race on the Move"

Tiffany D. Joseph is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Affiliated Faculty of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Stony Brook University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race, and reported the following:

Race on the Move takes readers on a journey from Brazil to the United States and back to explore how migration between each country is transforming Brazilian race relations. Brazil was once considered a racial paradise with its large multiracial population and absence of overtly discriminatory laws while the United States has a prolonged history of overt social exclusion aimed at nonwhites. However, with increasing Latino and multiracial populations in the United States, the use of quotas to reduce racial inequality in Brazil, and the movement of people between the two countries, contemporary race relations in each place are beginning to resemble the other. Using interviews conducted with residents of Governador Valadares (GV), Brazil’s largest immigrant-sending city to the U.S., I reveal how the exchange of racial ideals occurred among of these individuals and can potentially lead to a remaking of race in immigrant-sending communities.

Page 99 of Race on the Move demonstrates the extent to which changing one’s geographical context can influence his or her understanding of race as it relates to skin color. Specifically, this page discusses how GV return migrants classified their skin tones after returning from the United States and recognized that their skin tones were lighter compared to individuals who did not migrate from the tropical sunny climate of GV, which darkens skin tone. Returnees attributed the change to the colder and less sunny weather they encountered in the northeastern U.S. In sharing their conceptions, these return migrants constantly invoked the U.S. as a frame of reference to reinterpret the relevance of skin of color in Brazil post-migration.

The rest of the book also shows how return migrants use a similar process for readapting to race – particularly through negotiating classification, stratification, and discrimination – in Brazil. I argue that Brazil-U.S.-Brazil migration facilitates the development of a transnational racial optic, which alters how migrants “see” race in both countries by juxtaposing racial conceptions from each country. During migration, these individuals developed an understanding of race in the U.S. by incorporating Brazilian racial norms. An inverse process happened after these migrants returned to Brazil through which their experiences with race in the U.S. informed their post-migration perceptions of race in Brazil.

My concept of the transnational racial optic and using migration to compare race in the U.S. and Brazil is novel. Although there have been countless studies exploring micro and macro level differences in race relations in each country, Race on the Move is the first to consider how migration between both countries can influence racial understandings. Individuals on the move transport racial ideals with them which in turn can alter the places to which they migrate and the communities from which they come.

Learn more about the book and author at Tiffany D. Joseph's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nancy Woloch's "A Class by Herself"

Nancy Woloch teaches history at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her books include Women and the American Experience and Muller v. Oregon: A Brief History with Documents.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Class by Herself: Protective Laws for Women Workers, 1890s-1990s, and reported the following:

A Class by Herself tracks the rise and fall of women-only state protective laws – such as maximum-hour laws, minimum wage laws, and night work laws – from their origins in progressive reform through the passage of New Deal labor law to the feminist attack on single-sex protective laws in the 1960s and 1970s. The book explores the institutions that promoted women-only protective laws; the context in which the laws arose; the challenges that proponents faced; the arguments they invoked; the impact of the laws in ever-changing circumstances; and their dismantling in the wake of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Protective laws set precedents that led to the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 and to current labor law; they also sustained a tradition of gendered law that impeded equality for much of the century.

On page 99, I discuss a critical turning point in the history of protective laws: the passage of a 1913 law in Oregon to regulate working hours. The law imposed a ten-hour limit on the workdays of all persons in manufacturing, but allowed employees to work overtime for another three hours if their employers paid them time and a half.

From page 99:

The overtime provision, a seeming afterthought, was crucial. First, this provision embodied a specific intent: to deter employers from demanding long hours. “Time and a half” was an enforcement strategy. The threat to employers was weak—they risked little—but it was present. Second, “overtime” had longtime roots in labor law, mainly in laws that applied to men. . . . Most recently, demands for overtime had arisen briefly among strikers at the Lawrence, Massachusetts textile mills in 1912 . . . and in 1913 among Oregon timber workers . . . . “Overtime” was a labor demand suddenly catapulted into a “general” law. Third, although the Oregon law seemed to be gender neutral – that is, to apply to all “persons” in manufacturing—it soon applied almost entirely to male persons. Why? In June 1913, about six months after the Oregon legislature passed the 1913 law, lawmakers established an Industrial Welfare Commission, with the power to set maximum hours for women workers at or under the maximum set by statute. The IWC at once lowered maximum hours for women in industry to nine hours a day and forty-eight hours a week, with no loopholes for overtime.

The Supreme Court upheld the 1913 Oregon law in Bunting v. Oregon (1917), a landmark decision that served as a precedent for New Deal policy and a step toward modern labor standards. The decision fulfilled reformers’ goal of extending protective law to men; it also made “overtime,” or time and a half, an enduring part of labor law. But overtime was a wild card in protective law. The meaning of the term, unstable and volatile, was always in flux. Intended as a coercive tactic, an incentive for employers to limit working hours, overtime became by the 1940s an impetus for workers to earn more income; it also functioned as an employer prerogative. Finally, overtime became a divisive issue when activist women clashed over single-sex protective laws in the 1960s and 1970s. Page 99 suggests a theme that shapes my narrative: unintended consequences.

Learn more about A Class by Herself at the Princeton University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue