| Book Review | Law and History Review, 23.1

Book Review

Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 318. $59.95 cloth (ISBN 0-8078-2670-7); $22.50 paper (ISBN 0-8078-5354-2).

Today, liberal is one of the most abused words in the political lexicon, and officeseekers and officeholders generally try to avoid any connection to the term. Yet liberalism has a long tradition, for good and ill. The general theory has been that the ill came in the Gilded Age and the good in the progressive era, when a liberal resurgence eased some of the excesses of late nineteenth-century laissez-faire and Social Darwinism. The history of liberalism never was that simple, of course, a point that many historians have addressed and circled without necessarily landing squarely upon it. Nancy Cohen has dared to try, and the result is enthralling.

The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 is as fascinating, stimulating, and occasionally maddening as liberalism itself. "As an abundant literature makes clear, by 1900 the producers' movements that had been so characteristic of nineteenth-century America had gone down to defeat, and corporate capitalism had risen to dominance over the American economy," Cohen writes. "Gilded Age liberals had been in the vanguard of analyzing, explaining, and legitimating these innovations ... in reconciling corporate economic dominance and its attendant asymmetries of power with American democracy" (5). The combination that achieved this was political reformers and a new breed of social scientists. Their connection to progressivism has received attention, especially for their efforts to promote efficiency at all societal levels. This forced the scholars in particular to reconcile what they knew with what the less liberal-minded who controlled the universities wanted them to believe—a chapter in the history of academic freedom and threats to it that Cohen does justice.

Indeed, Cohen does a lot of subjects justice, covering a lot of ground in limited space and leaving the reader hankering for more. She analyzes the Republican party's view of labor, which proved surprisingly critical, given the free labor ideology so closely associated with Republicans. That, in turn, helped explain the party's retreat from Reconstruction (and, given the period in question, may demonstrate a subtlety in Cohen's title): sympathy with planters over economic and political problems. She presents thought-provoking portraits of leading thinkers of the time—those more influential than they seemed (William Graham Sumner, the Social Darwinist; Cohen finally may have driven a historical stake through his heart), those influential in different ways than they seemed (E. L. Godkin, whose impact waxed and waned as Gilded Age liberals left him behind), and those whose influence generally has been underrated (among others, not only Charles Francis Adams, Jr., but Henry C. Adams, who was unrelated and had a greater impact than the more famous Adams with whom he shares a first name).

Cohen's final two chapters, which were not part of the timeline of the dissertation on which this book is based, are the most interesting of all. She analyzes how the crises of the 1890s—psychic and otherwise—flowed into progressivism and how the unity these crises brought to liberal political intellectuals and social scientists did much to define the first two decades of the twentieth century. "The defining moment" of the 1890s proved to be the 1896 election, and not because the nomination of William Jennings Bryan enabled Democrats to staple the Populists to their party (202). In a thought-provoking argument, Cohen shows the importance of the usually denigrated silver movement and how it both connected to and contradicted the liberal ideology at the heart of this work.

If Cohen's work needs work in any particular area, it is law and constitutionalism—unfortunately, because her references are tantalizing. She neatly assesses Thomas Cooley's delineation of substantive due process, and, analyzing Justice Samuel Miller's "not wholly plausible" reading of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Slaughterhouse Cases, notes that liberals took advantage of how he and dissenters Joseph Bradley and Stephen Field defined federalism to justify backing away from expanded federal power (79). This might have led Cohen to assess the court's positions over the next few decades, in civil rights and in other realms. But not even Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., receives scrutiny, although the many studies of his legal and political views would seem to have made him a perfect fit for Cohen's construct of liberalism in the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras.

All books contain imperfections, usually a joint effort of the author and publisher, and this one is no different. She sometimes resorts to what can only be described as jargon when simple English would have sufficed. Walter Lippmann's name is consistently misspelled, and in noting his denigration of Woodrow Wilson, she neglects to add that they eventually united. While practical politics clearly remains in Cohen's sights, expanding upon the 1884 election would have been beneficial; she argues that the Liberal Republican revolt against Grant in 1872 was less critical to the history of liberal ideology than many believe and, if so, should have ruminated on the meaning (or lack of it) of the Mugwumps who bolted from James G. Blaine. The absence in her bibliography of several key works on politics and political ideology in that era by Vincent DeSantis, Stanley Hirshson, Wang Xi, Allen Weinstein, and H. Wayne Morgan may explain that. Employing their work would have improved her own.

Not that Cohen's study needs much improvement. She has done a prodigious amount of research and produced a vital and readable work for students and scholars of political, constitutional, and intellectual history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Perhaps Cohen's nuanced explanation of liberalism will even serve as a reminder that ideology deserves to be studied—and some ideologies deserve more respect than they receive.

Michael S. Green

Community College of Southern Nevada

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.