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Book Review
| Robert Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 293. $75.00 (ISBN 0-521-82789-2).
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| Caught up in the cross-currents of an agrarian past and the unfolding of what became a new industrial future, the Progressive Era was both one of the most complex periods in American history and a crucial juncture in the political development of the United States. While most historians and social scientists who have worked on this period have interpreted progressive reforms as an essential, if belated, response to the growing complexity of a modern industrial society, they have agreed on little else. Some have seen progressivism as the project of a vast social movement growing out of corporate capitalism, a rationalizing of both private and public institutions for the purpose of promoting corporate governance of the economy. Others have detected the hand of financial and commercial interests which crafted a national state that suited more narrow, selfish purposes. Yet another group have focused on the constituent base of progressivism in national politics and, from that perspective, have emphasized its agrarian roots in the South and the Plains and Far West. For them, progressivism was a variant on the populist program of the late nineteenth century, a blending of newer policy forms and ambitions with those of the earlier era. Still others have seen progressivism as an ethereal movement residing in ideation and vision, somewhat suspended above those who were the corporeal bearers of progressive ideology. For this last group, progressivism was, above all else, an intellectual agenda through which a transfer of power from uncouth, unlettered politicians to a university-trained bureaucracy was to be effected. |
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The Progressive Era has thus long been one of the "dark and bloody grounds" of historiography. Robert Harrison steps onto this contested terrain as an empiricist and an ideationalist. As an empiricist, he inductively interrogates roll call patterns in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate in order to identify the salient issue clusters and themes of the Progressive Era. However, his inductive exploration is tilted toward Republican insurgents in a number of ways. Most importantly, he often analyses the voting patterns of congressional Republicans in isolation from their Democratic colleagues. This allows him to develop "scales" of progressivism which he then applies to members of the Republican party, noting that progressive insurgents hailed primarily from the western reaches of the Midwest. Only in passing in these analyses are we told that the vast majority of Democrats would have scored much higher than the average Republican insurgent on these very same scales. If there was, in fact, a "fairly cohesive progressive coalition in Congress that held together over a wide range of issues" (11), that coalition was centered in the Democratic party and, if Harrison's scales alone were to be our guide, was composed almost exclusively of Democrats. The other tilt toward the Republicans is that Harrison excludes from his analysis the Congresses which met during the Wilson years. Thus truncating the Progressive Era, he denies attention to the Democratic party when it enacted what, in the end, became the most enduring and important policy landmarks of the period (e.g., the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Reserve Board, and the constitutional amendments permitting an income tax, direct election of senators, and women's suffrage). |
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The difficulty for Harrison is that Democrats, in his words, "were recruited almost exclusively from one section of the country," the South, and thus "could not be expected consistently to display a national breadth of vision" (254). But, as he notes repeatedly throughout the book, the Republican insurgents were also recruited almost entirely from one region of the country, the western reaches of the Midwest which was even more smaller than the South. In addition, since almost no Republicans represented southern districts, the Republican party, regulars and insurgents together, were also not a national party. In fact, since Harrison excludes the Wilson years, he omits the one period in which a truly national party (the Democrats) existed during the Progressive Era. Perhaps the real problem for Harrison arises out of what he sees as the failure of the Democratic party to understand that bureaucratic discretion was a necessary feature of "effective regulation ... in view of the complex and shifting nature of the issues" in a modern industrial society. In order to construct a modern state, "discretionary powers" had to be vested "in the hands of an administrative agency. Regulation by statute was not in most cases a viable option" (262). Thus, a "statutory state" was not a "realistic alternative to administrative regulation" (263). But a statutory state was exactly what congressional Democrats wanted to construct. So, while in terms of substantive policy, they were far more "progressive" than the relatively small band of Republican insurgents, they failed this statutory litmus test. Thus, what is at first presented as an inductive exploration of the legislative principles of progressivism, ultimately turns into a deductive assertion of the vanguard role of Republican insurgency in creating the modern state. |
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This book is clearly organized in a way that permits the author to vindicate "older views of progressivism at a national level, ascribing to it a greater coherence than has commonly been allowed ... rooted in a tradition of classical republicanism, expressing a clearly definable sense of sectional grievance and speaking to deeply-felt popular concerns about privilege and power" (260). Readers sympathetic to the author's perspective will find much in this volume to support those sympathies. Those somewhat skeptical will also find much of use here. The chapters on Congress as an institution and on legislative deliberations attending railroad regulation and social policy in the District of Columbia are thoroughly executed and contain much new information. His exploration of the papers of Republican insurgents has also been fruitful, particularly with respect to their relations with President Theodore Roosevelt. In these and other ways, the volume complements recent work by Elizabeth Sanders (Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917) who provides a broader and more comprehensive perspective on the period. |
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| Richard Bensel
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| Cornell University |
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