Evil Abroad and at Home

This chapter revisits the Cold War world, divided between capitalists and communists, a conflict that these curricula cast as a good-versus-evil morality play. American evangelicals allied with the Republican Party. They connected religion and corporate capitalism and rejected Democrats as New Deal socialists. These curricula praise Joseph McCarthy’s campaign to root out communism in the United States and condemn internationalism, especially the United Nations, as fostering a totalitarian, one-world government. They see the United States’ wars in Korea and Vietnam as insufficiently committed to the fight against communism. These textbooks weigh whether other nations developed collective political actions or social welfare programs; they deplore both as socialism or incipient communism. Decolonization made new parts of the world ripe for American capitalism or Soviet communism. They and their leaders were good or evil depending on whether they subscribed to the agenda of Christian conservatives.

Religion, Segregation, and Voting Rights: Unforgetting the Legacies of Bishops George Foster Pierce and Lucius Henry Holsey in Hancock County, Georgia, USA

In this essay, I explore the history and public memory of two important bishops in the Methodist churches in Georgia. Through an examination of the lives of my ancestor, Bishop George Foster Pierce, and his Black contemporary, Bishop Lucius Holsey, I seek to illustrate how the forces of settler colonialism, White supremacy, and emergent American capitalism converged with religious paternalism to shape their material lives and moral perspectives. Through family documents, letters, sermons, memorials, newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews, I situate their histories in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in Hancock County.

Sowing the Seeds of a Future Crisis: The SEC and the Emergence of the Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization (NRSRO) Category, 1971–1975

Since 2008, academics and policymakers have frequently debated why bond rating agencies such as Moody's, S&P, and Fitch enjoy considerable power and influence. The 2008 financial crisis focused our attention on the bond rating agencies that had previously categorized mortgage-backed securities as investment grade. Scholars have attributed the power enjoyed by the rating agencies to regulations that confer a privileged status on those agencies that are designated as nationally recognized statistical rating organizations (NRSROs) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). While these authors mention in passing that the relevant regulation went into effect in 1975, none has conducted archival research to examine why this regulation was introduced at that time. This article is the first historical investigation of the creation of this crucial regulation, which entrenched the concept of the NRSRO in federal securities law. It shows that the SEC mandated the use of NRSRO-created ratings even though SEC officials vigorously debated whether it was wise for the commission to endorse ratings produced by agencies that operate on the basis of the controversial issuer-pay model. This article contributes to our understanding of the SEC's role in the development of the distinctive features of American capitalism.