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Book Reviews
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Social Knowledge and the Struggle for Progressive-Era Reform
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| WESTHOFF, LAURA M. A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. xv + 276 pp. $47.95 (Cloth), ISBN 978-08142-1058.
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The interpretive tide has turned since a generation of historians documented the undemocratic aspects of Progressive Era reform and exposed the bureaucratic and coercive tendencies of this age of maturing corporate capitalism and emerging bureaucracies. More recent writings show a much less critical tone. Perhaps because we are experiencing the erosion of New Deal welfare-state entitlements and hard-won civil liberties, scholars now write with a new appreciation for the democratic aspirations and achievements of the progressives. Laura Westhoff is certainly in this company. She situates her study of Chicago reform and reformers in a historiography "seeking to recover the democratic potential of Progressive Era reform" (24). |
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A Fatal Drifting Apart is an ambitious attempt to theorize Progressive Era reform that succeeds only in part. Westhoff's focus is on what she calls the "epistemological dimensions of reform projects" (20) —on the beginnings of the movement of democratic ferment, not its transformation by war and repression. For example, her chapter on the Chicago Civic Federation usefully discusses the yeasty beginnings of civic reform immediately after the 1893 Chicago World's Exposition, a moment of "the expansion of voices and perspectives within civil society" (25). Because she limits her study to the years before 1918, she is able to make a convincing case that urban reform was "the site of struggles that brought new actors into the public discussion and with them, new 'social knowledge,'" knowledge that was "inclusive, socially mediated, and offered a methodology for social action" (x). She shows how, when reformers found the ideology of liberal republicanism inadequate to deal with the crises of the 1890s, they developed democratic approaches to reform in an attempt to prevent class fragmentation, the "fatal drifting apart" of the title. However, some of her examples (such as industrial arbitration) do not support this thesis as well as others; nor is her conclusion—that when reform failed to get political support it was because of disagreements caused by "intersecting, competing, and indeed colliding frameworks of knowledge" (24) —one that is always convincing. |
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Westhoff, an associate professor of history and education at the University of Missouri—St. Louis, brings to the topic an impressive familiarity with social and political history, cultural studies, and moral philosophy. The author sensibly limits herself to four discrete episodes in Chicago reform that she calls "key examples of democratic social knowledge in formation" (8), and she puts these topics together in an interesting way. They are, respectively, the Chicago Civic Federation and the charter movement; Hull House; the Pullman Strike and subsequent efforts at industrial arbitration; and reform and reformers in Chicago's black community. In each case, Westhoff foregrounds a struggle over the politics of knowledge, asking who creates knowledge and whose knowledge counts. |
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Westhoff's chapter on Hull House reflects a decade of vibrant new writing on that famous settlement, most of it celebratory. Not surprisingly, she frames Hull House as an experiment in democratic social knowledge, whose leading residents, with "growing interest in knowledge of others (and the Other)" (19), gained insights from their contacts with the poor that helped to replace liberal individualism and formal systems with proximate or local knowledge. They created new civic identities for themselves as they gathered new knowledge about the local community. |
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