A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 |...

A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 | Michael McGerr | Good Overview of the Progressive Movement

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A Fierce Disconten...

	A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 Michael McGerr Oxford University Press, USA, 2005 - 424 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

With America's current and ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor and the constant threat of the disappearance of the middle class, the Progressive Era stands out as a time when the middle class had enough influence on the country to start its own revolution. Before the Progressive Era most Americans lived on farms, working from before sunrise to after sundown every day except Sunday with tools that had changed very little for centuries. Just three decades later, America was utterly transformed into a diverse, urban, affluent, leisure-obsessed, teeming multitude. This explosive change was accompanied by extraordinary public-spiritedness as reformers--frightened by class conflict and the breakdown of gender relations--abandoned their traditional faith in individualism and embarked on a crusade to remake other Americans in their own image.
The progressives redefined the role of women, rewrote the rules of politics, banned the sale of alcohol, revolutionized marriage, and eventually whipped the nation into a frenzy for joining World War I. These colorful, ambitious battles changed the face of American culture and politics and established the modern liberal pledge to use government power in the name of broad social good. But the progressives, unable to deliver on all of their promises, soon discovered that Americans retained a powerful commitment to individual freedom. Ironically, the progressive movement helped reestablish the power of conservatism and ensured that America would never be wholly liberal or conservative for generations to come.
Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent recreates a time of unprecedented turbulence and unending fascination, showing the first American middle-class revolution. Far bolder than the New Deal of FDR or the New Frontier of JFK, the Progressive Era was a time when everything was up for grabs and perfection beckoned.

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Ambiguities of reform

This well-done account of the rise of the Progressive Movement is as good on the history of the period, and is studded with many interesting details about the Victorian period in the gestation of the great challenge to the world of big business. Notable, and what makes the book out of the ordinary, is depiction of the limits of the movement seen in the account of the movement's attitudes toward segregation. This was also the era of consolidated Jim Crow, where were the Reformer? The book is food for thought indeed given the strange similarity to our own era of politics, or lack of it.

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Good Overview of the Progressive Movement

McGerr's book is a valuable resource on helping to define who the progressives were and what they wanted to accomplish. The Progressives were at their peak in influence from the late 19th Century until the end of World War I, from Theodore Roosevelt's administration to Woodrow Wilson's administration. As McGerr stated, Progressives wanted to transform Americans into their own image of a middle class society, uplifting the poorest workers while chastising the wealthiest. It is this transformative vision that makes the Progressive movement stand out from most other political movements in our country's history. In addition to transforming Americans, McGerr says Progressives wanted to end class conflict, use government to control big businesses, and use segregation to help implement their objectives successfully.

McGerr is effective in adding the human dimension to his history of Progressivism. The Garlands, young Rahel Golub and her immigrant family, the Bradley-Martins and others are all used to give an image of who some of the wage laborers, upper class and progressive reformers were. The reformers include many of the standard names like Hull-House founder Jane Addams, salon smashing Carrie Nation, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and a host of other reformers in all different strata of society. Many organizations that formed to support the various agendas of the Progressive movement are also mentioned, including the Anti-Saloon League, the Country Life Commission, and others that represented various Progressive causes.

I felt the author was most focused on and interested in the Progressive belief in transforming other people to conform to this middle class vision of society and he handles the issue very ably. Whether it be their dislike of rugged individualism or their crusades against personal vices like divorce and alcohol or their belief in the promises of education, the Progressives truly believed people could be changed and molded into their way of thinking. While a bold and radical idea, it is also naive and arrogant. As time revealed, people grew tired and resistant to the Progressive idea of changing people's attitudes and way of living. Times had changed with technological innovations like the automobile and new recreational and leisure activities that allowed for a new sense of personal freedom. The effects of World War I and the new challenges in a post-war society also added to the decline of Progressive ideals.

Surprisingly, I didn't think the author gave a lot of attention to more of the legislative accomplishments of the Progressive Era, especially during the Wilson Administration, but overall as well. He mentioned many topics that led to enacted legislation, but generally with little detail. McGerr is quite good in showing the larger picture and how people reacted to the movement and how external factors effected its progression and or decline. The social aspects of the Progressive movement are his clear strong points. From a political standpoint I think the author was more sympathetic to the more radical reformers who wanted greater, more broad-sweeping reform. He shows the Progressives for who they were and what they hoped to achieve, with their strengths and their flaws. I think he is right in assessing the times we live in as a bit disappointing politically. But as he stated, that is one of the consequences of the Progressive Era with its high hopes and expectations, expectations that realistically could never be accomplished.

The Progressives can be credited for bringing many political, economic and social issues to the forefront of public debate as well as leaving a legacy of some very notable legislative accomplishments that endure to this day. Ultimately, they could not overcome the innate belief held by so many concerning the importance of the individual and that person's belief in being allowed to achieve whatever type of life and way of living they felt entitled to pursue without other individuals, groups or government telling them how to live. As McGerr stated in his conclusion, the Progressives overreached; they tried to accomplish too much. The backlash it produced has led other leaders as well as a large section of the population to approach any mention of reform, at least in relation to individuals, with a justifiable amount of caution.

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Well rounded

In McGerr's view, progressivism was a broad based Victorian middle class movement dedicated to extending its way of life - sober, abstemious, moderate, associative, protective, hard-working, modern, consumerist if guiltily so - both upward to a profligate and individualist capitalist elite and downward to an unruly and dissipated working class.

Its work was only partially successful - antitrust, regulation, healthcare, communal associations - and ultimately done in by its own contradictions. Progressives, moderates by temperate and nature, could not embrace the extremism inherent in its boldest initiatives. This became apparent in the bold initiatives undertaken by the Wilson administration for World War I, greatly extending government reach in private and commercial affairs.

This is a rich and nuanced interpretation of the era. Jaklak sez check it out.

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Ultimately unsatisfying, 2.5 Stars

"Progressivism" is one of the vaguer words in the history of American politics, and we could always do with a new attempt to define it. And Michael McGerr's new book starts out promisingly. There is an apparently detailed description of the very rich, workers and farmers which appears to be based on the latest research. The book is supported with sixty pages of notes, though there are no archival sources, and the primary sources are mostly from the usual suspects (Wilson, Roosevelt, Jane Addams, plus a few memoirs from Hamlin Garland and Rahel Golub.) McGerr continues with a discussion of the middle class, and how concern over increasing class conflict and social instability encouraged them to support a Progressive philosophy-one that encouraged a sense of association instead of the old individualism, as well as a strong Protestant moralism that valued duty and discouraged pleasure. He then looks at how Progressives sought to change Americans, such as by encouraging school attendance, supporting prohibition, attacking divorce and improving country life. There then follow chapters on limiting class conflict, regulating big business, and imposing segregation. However, Progressivism does meet its nemesis. The rise of the automobile and modern transportation, the rise of popular amusements and jazz, and a more liberal attitude towards sexuality threatens Progressivism's stern ethic. The attempts to encourage government regulation in the First World War only undercut support for it, leading to the disastrous electoral defeat of 1920. In the end, McGerr concludes, this reinforces the "basic lesson" that "reformers should not try too much."

Unfortunately on closer examination one sees that McGerr has produced a superficial book. It's not just that looking at the endnotes one finds that most of the book could have been written a decade earlier with little loss, with some chapters printed two or three decades earlier. It's not just that the chapters on labor and business are not especially original. There are larger problems with causation and logic. One of the things researchers in the seventies and eighties noted about Progressivism was its variety. It had supporters in all regions, it appealed to workers and farmers as well as the middle class, it appealed to immigrant Catholics, Protestant moralists, and secular intellectuals. Progressives could be in both parties, and included racist imperialists and the most humane socialists. Instead of dealing with this variety, McGerr limits it to the middle class, since none of the other groups "advocated the full range of progressive positions as consistently as the middle class did." The problem is that the same middle class made up the overwhelming majority of politicians in the unProgressive Gilded Age, as well as the overwhelming majority of politicians in the age of Harding and Hoover. In the fifties Richard Hofstadter introduced the idea of "status anxiety." This idea was a flawed one, but at least it tried to explain why some of the middle class supported Progressivism and others didn't. McGerr never does so.

There are other gaps. There is no discussion of Progressivism in a comparative context, so we do not learn how successful they were in comparison with their European contexts (This is especially true of their view of the state). Much discussion of Progressivism asks about its connection with modernity. Was the Progressive endorsement of such things as prohibition and racial segregation a sign of its reactionary character? Or did such measures show how "modern" apparently reactionary people as prohibitionists and racists were? And if so, what does that say about modernity as a whole? McGerr does nothing to answer this question. There is no discussion of foreign policy before the First World War, no real discussion of why the United States entered the war, and little discussion of its postwar plans. This complicates the whole idea of a Progressive break with its predecessors and successors. There are obvious continuities with McKinley and Roosevelt, and scholars such as William A. Williams and Frank Costigliola have pointed out that the twenties was not an era of simple minded isolationism.

There are problems with McGerr's emphasis on pleasure as the solvent of Progressivism. There is an emphasis on increasing sexuality, but there are no facts about illegitimacy, pre-marital sex, prostitution or abortion. Moreover, far from dying in 1920, the twenties marked the triumph of Prohibition, and it was still an electoral winner for Herbert Hoover in 1928. Not did Protestant Hegemony go away either. At other points McGerr takes his sources' complaints at face value, whether about Progressive distaste for the vulgarly wealthy or Republican complaints about the First World War. It is not clear why regulation of the economy should be so fatal to the Democrats, when conservatives accepted a version of it in Britain and France and won the post-war elections. And to say that Progressives shouldn't have tried too hard simply reflects journalistic cant and its willingness to split the differences between the two sides, as well as its easy contempt for people with more principle. One could ask industrial workers denied a union, immigrants and African-Americans living with the GOP's enormous condescension, or Sacco and Vanzetti whether Republican domination was simply part of the natural balance of things. Ultimately this is a book that is less than it appears. In such works scholars tend to summon up amusing anecdotes as a substitute for analysis. But McGerr is no Orlando Figes or Simon Schama. The most memorable story concerns the fact that J.P. Morgan, when he didn't like the tune of the hymn being played, would ostentatiously jingle the coins in his pocket. Those crazy rich people.

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The Good Old Days

The Progressive Era, notes a review, was "essentially a middle-class revolution fueled by a belief in the sanctity of the home and the need for equality between the sexes. The era's vehement campaigns against drink, prostitution, and divorce and its grappling with class conflict and racism were as much about personal happiness and health as they were about social progress." Another review on this page notes the era's egalitarian expansiveness, and faults Professor McGerr for accentuating the era's middle-class matrix.

I think the middle-class contextualists are right, but they don't go far enough. Progressively fighting drink, drunks, and sex were atavistic throw-backs to 19th Century Protestant wars against degenerate urban Catholics. Old anti-saloon leagues were painted over with a veneer of progress, and were pushed forward in the 20th Century as Prohibition. Prohibition & progressiveism were really about putting hyphenated papists back in their place, and their place was with other sub-normal enemies of the people that capitalism had let off the boat. The progressive project was hygiene & purity. It was eugenics.

Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and other progressive purists wanted a clean America. Cleansing Catholic corruption from saloons was a start, but real progress meant cleansing America ethnically: broom the cheap drinkers as well as the drink. Clean the slums. Alter and improve subhumans in their hovels so they couldn't reproduce & recapitulate their pathologies. Battle for the Lord at Armageddon with the weapons of Darwin and Galton. If McGerr discussed the Progressive Era's final solution to a tainted America, I missed it.

Here are random notes from the book, trivial pieces & parts in lieu of the story about eugenic progress that McGerr probably should have told:

By 1918, a government handbook listed almost three thousand mostly new agencies engaged in the mobilization, including the Alimentary Paste War Service Committee and the Chalks and Crayons War Servie Committee. (284)

(T)he Food Administration set priorities, promoted production, urged conservtion, and attempted to set prices. Its director, ... Hoover esposed the characteristic progressive critique of the nation's individualist heritage. "We have gone for a hundred years of unbridled private initiative in this country," he said, "and it has bred its own evils and one of these evils is the lack of responsibility in the American individual to the people as a whole...." (285)

Faced with so much popular hesitation about intervention, the Wilson administraiton had an obsessive fear of anything even approaching disloyalty -- and a blunt determination to root it out. "Woe to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way ...," Wilson warned in June 1917. Congress backed up the President's threat with a battery of legislation -- the Alien Act, the Alien Enemies Act, the Espionage Act, the Sedition Act, the Selective Service act, and the Trading with the Enemy Act -- that gave the federal government sweeping powers to fine and jail anyone obstructing the war effort in any way. The Sedition Act, for instance, made illegal "uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United Statyes government or the military." ... (E)ffectively threatened the mailing privileges of any journal that even seemed to "impugn the motives of the government and thus encourage insubordination."

Meanwhile, the government used its new authority to go after ostensibly radical individuals and organizations. ... Another court condemned the labor leader and socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs of Terre Haute, Indiana, to ten years in jail. Federal proceedings in chicago, Kansas City, and Sacramento sent nearly two hundred members of the radical labor union, the International Workers of the World, to jail.

The government's efforts in turn encouraged local officials and private citizens to join in purging disloyalty. Around the country, a quarter of a million members of the American Protective League opened mail and bugged telephones to spy on suspected traitors and reported the results to Washington. ... "In spite of excesses such as lynching," editorialized The Washington Post, "it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country."

As the Wilson administration made sure Americans would not be exposed to dangerous views, the government also tried to determine just what informaion and ideas the people would encounter. ... (S)aw the war as a critical opportunity to advance the progressive agenda ... (290 - 291)

Herbert Hoover's Food Adminstration similarly urged Americans to restrict their appetite for pleasure. Hoover himself passionately deplored the apparent waste and indulgence of the nation's eating habits. ...

So the Food Adminstrations Education Division exhorted the people to choose "meatless and "wheatless" days. An avalanche of advertising drove home the message "FOOD WILL WIN THE WAR - DON'T WASTE IT." Half a million volunteers went door to door asking every man, woman, and child to sign pledge cards vowing support of the Food administraiton and conservation. A special pledge card for children, "A Little American's Promise," vowed:

At table I'll not leave a scrap
Of food upon my plate.
And I'll not eat between meals but
For supper time I'll wait.
I make the promise that I'll do
My honest, earnest part
In helping my America
With all my loyal heart.

Toddlers who could not sign a pledge card had their own rewritten nursery rhymes:

Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn!
The cook's using wheat where she ought to use corn ...

Before long Hooverize became a verb meaning "to save or economize." ... In all,, the Food Administration effectively mobilized what it called the "compelling force of patriotic sentiment in the name of thrift."

For all the emphasis on voluntary conservation, the progressives were always willing to achieve their objectives at least in part through compulsion. (293 - 294)

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