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The 1924 Immigration Act struck a delicate balance between racial and national distinctions—between admitting the workers American capitalists needed and avoiding the “racial indigestion” Cubberley observed. The law instituted a quota system, ranking Europeans by national-racial preference and admi…

When it came to translating bionomic insights into eugenic policy, California was ahead of the curve. Chinese exclusion made the country’s racial health a question of border security, and the West was the edge of whiteness. At the same time, agricultural employers in the West needed a regular (thou…

Away from the Associates, Stanford came into his own in Palo Alto. Never all that interested in railroads (or really anything in particular), he finally found something worth his time: horses. The nouveau riche hobby of breeding racehorses captured his attention in a way that other business didn’t.…

[...] Financiers wanted a way to access the potentially unlimited western gains they read about. Like the forty-niners who chased easy, transformative wealth, speculators were looking to get their hands on yields that weren’t yoked to the magnitude of the investment, all without having to do any ac…

[...] Shelgrim presents himself as a bundle of social forces, the embodiment of impersonal currents—and he is, but not of the currents he claims. Because it wasn’t demand for wheat that built the speculative railroad lines. Supply and demand determine commodity prices—though not nearly so directly …