the intense regionalism which ripped the nation apart during the Civil War) (Caldeira & Wright, 1990, 6). Despite its increasingly nationalized role, the process of appointing Supreme Court Justices remained the almost-mysterious purview of a small circle of participants. These participants included the President, which the Constitution designated as the nominator of Justices, the Senate which was charged with the responsibility of confirming or denying these nominations, and some bar associations which generally lent informal recommendations when consulted.
As the nation accelerated its industrialization at the end of the nineteenth-century, emphasis on capitalism, mass production, mass labor, and mass movements also increased. McCloskey writes:
The question of whether government should control capitalism, and how much it should control it, moved to the center of the American political arena and was never very far from that center for the next seventy years. In this second great period of constitutional history, then, running roughly from t
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