| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Shelton Stromquist. Re-Inventing "The People": The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism. (The Working Class in American History.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2006. Pp. x, 289. Cloth $50.00, paper $22.00.
Shelton Stromquist offers an interesting, although rather conventional, leftist critique of American Progressivism. He argues that Progressives desperately sought to achieve class harmony, even that they came together as a "movement" only so that they might "marginalize and disarm an alternative politics of class" (p. 7). Their reform visions, however, foundered on the shoals of class conflict. By failing to come to grips with class divisions, Stromquist contends, Progressives set the tone for a similarly flawed twentieth-century liberalism.	1
There is much to recommend in this argument, which Stromquist bases largely on secondary sources. Scholars have long recognized that even the most fire-breathing Progressives often viewed themselves as profoundly "conservative" in their desire to forestall revolution. Stromquist does a fine job demonstrating the pervasive, and violent, nature of class confrontation from the Pullman Strike (1894) through the aftermath of World War I. He also is quite convincing that progressive figures such as Jane Addams, John Dewey, and Paul Kellogg clung to social harmony as one of their highest goals.	2
Stromquist spends most of the book on class issues, conventionally defined, although he includes a couple of nearly throwaway chapters on race and gender. His most important chapter highlights the work of the United States Commission on Industrial Relations, which met from 1912 to 1915 to investigate, analyze, and publicize the crisis of labor-management relations. Stromquist explores the deep split within the commission over the extent of corporate misdeeds and the need for worker organization, and he traces this division to the enduring conflict in progressive thinking about class. Stromquist's protagonist—and really the only truly good guy in the book—is Frank Walsh, the Kansas City attorney and laborite politico who chaired the commission.	. . .

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