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Book Reviews
Progressives on a Global Stage
| DAWLEY, ALAN. Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. x + 409 pp. Introduction, illustrations, notes, index. $49.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-6911-1322-X; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 0-6911-2235-0.
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I owe a deep intellectual debt to Alan Dawley. His book Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (1991) got me through my graduate school general exams, provided a breathtaking new chronology of state-building and reform in the early twentieth century, and helped me to see how the tools of social history could uncover the role of ordinary people in the construction of the modern American state. The book literally changed my life. Changing the World, equally ambitious but not as successfully executed, may not change anyone's life. But it will help historians of progressivism to rethink the early twentieth century in a more international frame.1 |
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"Any definition of 'progressive,'" Dawley writes, "has to begin with progress" (41). Changing the World begins with a cast of characters who are passionately enamored of the future, and their progressivism is fundamentally transformative, not ameliorative. They would choke on a diet of piecemeal. Nor do they nefariously cloak sinister aims at social control in the garb of reform. Dawley usefully reminds us that progressivism could, and frequently did, claim the mantle of revolution in a pre-Bolshevik era when revolution stood for much more (or much less) than Soviet collectivism. These progressives wanted not merely to interpret the world, but to change it. |
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And it was the world they wanted to change: American progressives emerge as truly global in scope, dedicated to "combating the evils in their own society, while also improving the wider world" (1), focused particularly on social justice, civic engagement, and foreign relations. This dynamic relationship between reform at home and reform abroad structures Dawley's account; while Daniel Rodgers's Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (1998) provides a global history of progressivism, Changing the World offers a history of global progressivism.2 |
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Dawley demonstrates the conceptual power of his approach in his account of two events of April 1914 that frequently appear in different chapters of history textbooks: the Ludlow Massacre, in which federal troops gunned down more than twenty striking miners in Colorado, and the U.S. naval intervention in Veracruz. The pairing is not merely fashionable transnationalism applied retrospectively to the Progressive Era; the link made sense to reformers at the time. "The maintenance of social justice in Mexico," editorialized The Outlook, "will inspire us to maintain social justice in Colorado" (32). For John D. Rockefeller, who had sunk capital into both sites, the linkage of Colorado and Tampico made sense, too—good business sense. |
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Dawley's global perspective reminds us that the years between 1910 and 1921 marked an age of revolutions that remade the global order. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia takes center stage, but Ireland, Mexico, and China play their roles too. Unfortunately, though, Dawley views global revolutionary events through resolutely American lenses. This helps us see Jane Addams and even Woodrow Wilson in new ways, but it has its limits. In Changing the World, John J. Pershing and Pancho Villa cross the Mexican border, but a full history of this global age of revolution would account not only for Villa, but for as many as one million other Mexicans who crossed the border (in both directions) during the Mexican Revolution. American Legionnaires menaced IWW radicals in the postwar Pacific Northwest, but they also targeted the Irish Republic's president, Eamon de Valéra, in Seattle to mobilize funds and troops for the global Irish diaspora's assault on British imperialism.3 |
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