| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 95.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform. By Laura M. Westhoff. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. xvi, 309 pp. Cloth, $47.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-1058-1. CD-ROM, $9.95, ISBN 978-0-8142-9137-5.)

The motivations and aspirations of Gilded Age and Progressive Era reformers continue to intrigue historians, as evidenced by this latest inquiry into the public rhetoric (and occasionally private thoughts) of a carefully chosen group of reformers and organizations in late nineteenth-century Chicago. Their ideas are filtered through an interpretive prism that the author characterizes as "democratic social knowledge," that is, "a way of knowing that privileges experience, proximity, interaction, and sympathetic understanding and that encourages negotiation of multiple perspectives" (p. 4). At the heart of this epistemology was the struggle between muscular capitalism and laborers, women, and African Americans during an age that threatened, in the words of Jane Addams, "a fatal drifting apart" (p. 1).

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