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Review Essay
Star Power: The Limits of
Personality Politics in the Progressive Era
Eric Rauchway
University of California, Davis
Gorn, Elliott J. Mother Jones: The Most Dangerous Woman in America.
New York: Hill & Wang, 2001. xi + 303 pp. Introduction, illustrations,
notes, and index, $27.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-8090-7093-6. New York: Hill &
Wang, 2002, $14.00 (paper), ISBN 0-8090-7094-4.
Slayton, Robert A. Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al
Smith. New York: The Free Press, 2001. xvi + 480 pp. Introduction,
illustrations, notes, and index, $30.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-6848-6302-2.
Unger, Nancy C. Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xiv + 393
pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index, $24.95
(cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2545-X.
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Historians' new, culturally inflected
interest in biography focuses on the construction of identity, or
how individual subjects fashioned selves for themselves. These can
be diverting stories, but unless the struggle to make an identity
proves somehow consequential outside the life itself, unless, as
one scholar writes, the story of identity contains "the potential
for changing historians' 'master narratives,"' then there is
little difference between studying these personalities and reading
about mere "celebrities."1
We may learn a great deal about who people claimed they became,
but little about what they did, or whether it mattered. |
1
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The problem of personality looms especially
large in progressive-era historiography. When asked to write the
authorized biography of John D. Rockefeller, progressive historian
Charles Beard offered, I should be immensely interested in doing
the book in terms of my conception, namely, a truly Napoleonic figure
against a rich background of American economic, political, and cultural
development."2
Beard was making a close analogy between Rockefeller and Napoleon:
both men turned revolutions-in-progress to their personal advantage.
In consequence, the story of the revolution was as important as
the story of the man. Some neo-progressive historians have gone
even further than Beard, discarding personality altogether in favor
of the impersonal engines that transformed American life in the
early twentieth century: "Biographies of 'progressives' tend
to overemphasize the role of their principles in securing legislation,"
Elizabeth Sanders writes, arguing that dithery "Hamlet-like
insurgent Republicans" take up narrative space that rightly
belongs to demographic and economic change.3 |
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