McGERR, MICHAEL. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920. New York: The Free Press, 2003. xvi + 395 pp. Preface, notes, and index. $30 (cloth), ISBN 0-684-85975-0.

     For fifty years now, historians have sought to identify the progressives and to define their motives and goals. While some historians describe ethnic, working-class groups as progressive reformers, and Glenda Gilmore at least sees southern African Americans as progressives seeking political opportunity, progressives are most often viewed as white, middle-class, native-born Americans—generally male—seeking to reform society to conform with their middle-class norms.¹ A Fierce Discontent fits squarely into this interpretive scheme.

     Dividing his book into three parts, McGerr casts his investigation around well-known figures such as Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt, E.A. Ross, Mabel Dodge, and lesser-known ones such as economist Simon Patten, to claim that these were the progressives: cultural "Victorians" become "progressives" who formulated "new views of the individual, society, gender, and pleasure." They were united, according to McGerr, in their desire "to transform other Americans, to remake the nation's feuding polyglot population in their own middle class image," and "end class conflict and create a safe society for themselves and their children" (xiv, 64). Here one hears echoes of Richard Hofstadter: these "Victorians" turned "Progressives" are driven by cultural ideas derived from their social status.