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Review
| Re-inventing 'The People': The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism, by Shelton Stromquist. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006. 289 pages. $50.00, cloth; $22.00, paper.
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| It is always fun to recommend a page-turner, a capably written book, packed with bows to other scholars and bearing a convincingly supported argument. All teachers of American history, as well as students in undergraduate and graduate courses focused on the Gilded Age and Progressive Era should enjoy this book. Shelton Stromquist, begins with a rich and detailed historiography focused on Progressives and the problem of class. Although subsequent chapters cover much familiar ground, from battles between regulators and trust-busters to sections on the American Federation of Labor, urban reform, settlement houses, the Women's Trade Union League, the Convention of 1912, and other topics associated with Progressivism, this is done gracefully and in the service of a new synthetic thesis. Some historians have gone too far in deconstructing and destroying the notion of a Progressive movement. They have "lost sight of [a] core vision amid the whirl of reform activity, functional organization, and interest-group mobilization." Stromquist contends that, despite differences over methods for making a humane industrial society, a post-Civil War generation of "intellectuals, social gospel reformers, young educated women, labor activists, and insurgent politicians developed over time a sense of participating in what they came to call a 'movement.'" (p. 3) As they formed organizations and developed a common language in response to popular upheavals in industrial society, Progressives shunned the legacies of Populism and generally avoided joining a vigorous and growing Socialist Party which accepted classes as a necessary feature of American society. "What we have understood as 'progressive'," Stromquist argues, "was to a very large degree still shaped by a common vision of cross-class reform." (p. 9) |
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Too often, historians and teachers have ignored Progressives' racism and nativism. With few exceptions, Stromquist notes, Progressives' "vision of the people, although universal in its claims" excluded new immigrants and African Americans, who "were consigned to the margins" as "dependent peoples," who "merited charitable attention, even concerted education," but who were also "incapable of constructive group activity on their own behalf." (p. 9) In a chapter, "The Boundaries of Difference," Stromquist shows how the Progressives' Lamarckian views, the notion that people could acquire and pass on characteristics developed within positive environments, fitted with their thinking about immigrants and African Americans. White progressives neither challenged segregation nor imagined an integrated society which appreciated difference. "Citizenship," Stromquist says, "by definition entailed assimilation to 'whiteness.'" Northern reformers sympathized with "southern Progressives who argued that premature black enfranchisement had fostered political corruption." Sharing "a belief in the racial ordering of peoples," they supported literacy tests and other methods of restricting voting by new immigrants in northern states. (pp. 132–133) Stromquist observes that white Progressives, first attracted to "Booker T. Washington's program of racial accommodation and self-help...never wholly accepted the more assertive, rights-oriented position of Washington's opponents." (pp. 163–164) |
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While many historians have seen World War I as the crucible in which Progressive hopes for "industrial democracy" were crushed, Stromquist disagrees. Massive strikes and evidence of laboring people's resistance to exploitation between 1909 and 1914—the time of the immigrant steelworkers' uprising at McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, of the shirtwaist workers' walkout in New York City, of hard-rock miners' striking in Ludlow, Colorado, and of textile workers efforts for workers' control in Lawrence, Massachusetts—led reformers in 1913 to support the creation of the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations both to investigate the causes of unrest and to invent policies for overcoming the social crisis. However, Frank Walsh, who chaired the Commission and wrote its report, came to believe, in contrast to the majority of Progressives, that problems revealed in the investigation could only be addressed by a redistribution of wealth and power and by creation of a new politics that recognized labor's right to organize on its own terms and to bargain collectively. The Commission's report supported neither "administrative intervention by neutral experts," a preferred Progressive solution to social crisis, nor "mediation and conciliation," but rather "political mobilization of labor on its own behalf" and "a fundamental realignment of class power." (p. 186) Thus, Stromquist argues that, before the storm of strikes, riots and red-baiting which accompanied World War I, persistent class conflict and the Commission's work had already revealed the inadequacy of the cross-class model of reform and "challenged the defining feature of the Progressive movement—its promise of social harmony through democratic renewal." (p. 193) |
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In a final chapter, Stromquist returns to the promise of his title. Modern liberalism, he argues, has since the New Deal maintained Progressives' core values "and their project of using the state...to engineer a society inclusive of the people and less vulnerable to social upheavals" of "the dispossessed." Modern liberalism also continues "the unfinished project of reinventing the people." Although racial and ethnic discrimination finally captured liberal attention after World War II, this also "reinforced the displacement of the class problem." Twenty-first century liberals who want to address issues of unequal taxation and millions without health insurance are now paradoxically accused, by conservatives, of fomenting class warfare. Stromquist hopes for the emergence of a new "politics of class," which might draw on the legacies of Populists, Socialists and radical Unionists to challenge, "in the United States and around the world...the entrenched power and greed of the rich and their political allies." (p. 204) |
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| Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville |
Ellen Nore |
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