My current book project, “Virtuous Citizens,” examines why “good moral character” (GMC) requirements became embedded in occupational licensing laws in nineteenth-century America. Why did laws designed to regulate occupational skill and competence also empower actors to judge applicants’ character? Drawing on occupational journals, newspapers, legislative records, and state and federal court cases, I trace how these open-ended requirements emerged across occupations and acquired enduring institutional force. Moving beyond accounts of licensing centered on economic exclusion, I argue that moral regulation provided occupational actors and civic groups with a distinctive means of negotiating status through the regulation of economic life.

The book identifies two pathways through which morality entered occupational regulation. Occupational associations—including those representing lawyers, teachers, and barbers—championed moral requirements to elevate their status, while civic groups imposed them on trades they regarded as socially or culturally suspect, including peddlers, watchmakers, and liquor sellers. Across these different pathways, morality functioned as a flexible and contested institutional resource for enforcing religious identities, middle-class norms, political loyalties, and racial boundaries. “Virtuous Citizens” shows how, amid shifting social and occupational boundaries, regulating economic life became a means of organizing social life itself—shaping not only who could participate in markets, but which people, conduct, and forms of belonging were recognized as legitimate.