Michael McGerr’s A Fierce Discontent is a sweeping and compelling overview of the Progressive Era. In this book, McGerr takes a narrow view of the Progressive Era, generally focusing on the first two decades of the twentieth century. He also defines progressivism relatively narrowly, focusing on the middle class – what he calls “the radical center.”

This “radial center” was sandwiched between the upper and working classes. Affluent but not immensely rich (unlike the tycoons that made up the “upper ten”), these middle class people were able to partake in the bounty created by the new industrialized world but still had to truly work for a living. Thus the radical center was made up the new emerging professional classes – such as white-collar workers – and the older professions – such as ministers, lawyers, and doctors. Emerging out of the “Victorian” middling classes of the first half and middle decades of the nineteenth century, these middle class progressives both embraced and rejected their parents’ values. Still valuing work as the “Victorians” did, the progressives’ also valued pleasure – but only sort of productive pleasures that strengthened one’s character. Trips to the countryside were in; trips to the saloon were not. Chautauqua with its country strolls and lecture courses was the ideal middle class vacation.

The largest break progressives made with their “Victorian” inheritance was their rejection of individualism. Individualism, in the progressives’ eyes, had run amuck in early twentieth century America. It had allowed capitalism to develop unchecked; creating unstable disparities of wealth, broken families, and a decadent and debauched “upper ten.” Progressives sought to replace individualism with “association” – the sense of working together as a community for the common good. McGerr suggestively quotes Jane Addams arguing, “[W]e must demand that the individual shall willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity on in connection with the activity of the many.”[1] This sense of “association,” most obviously, set the progressives against the individualists of the “upper ten” – who claimed the fruits of capitalism as their own individual achievement. It also, in McGerr’s assessment, set them against the “mutualism” of the working classes. Working class “mutualism” grew out of a shared sense of identity, a common class-consciousness. Middle class “association,” on the other hand, grew out of a sense of difference – “it meant crossing class lines to bring together people of diverse identities and conditions.”[2]

What makes the progressive middle class “the radical center,” in McGerr’s assessment, is its willingness to impose values on those above and below it on the economic ladder. By brining the “upper tenth” to heel, uplifting the working class, and replacing American individualism with “association,” the progressives sought to radically reshape American society and life and create, what McGerr terms, “a middle class paradise.” This went beyond just ending class economic strife (though that was an important aspect) but to cultural reform as well. Through reform efforts like prohibition, anti-divorce, expanding education, settlement houses, and more progressives went, in their battle for America, to the political and cultural throat. When cultural reforms efforts failed, progressives were not above employing the state to force Americans into reforming themselves.

“Association” had its limits and dark side, however. The lower classes were to live reformed, yet separate lives from the middle class. Progressives were, in McGerr’s assessment, as committed to segregation as they were to women’s suffrage and curtaining corporate malefactors. Fear of racial war, acquiesce to southern racial norms, and middle class discomfort with African-Americans led progressives to endorse segregation. Indeed, segregation wasn’t just for blacks but for all “lesser” sorts – immigrants, the poor, Native Americans. McGerr quotes one reformer as noting “[w]hat is true… of the negro masses is largely true of the white masses.”[3] “The radical center’s” commitment to democracy had its limits.

Progressivism had its enemies in the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century – none more so than the culture of pleasure and modernism. By going to the movies, to the amusement park, driving fast cars, by partaking in pleasure-centered sex, by listening to jazz music, and more many Americans rejected the cultural restraint of the progressives. Modernism, with its criticism of settled values, also provided a critique of progressivism’s commitment to objective truth and a straightforward notion of the common good. Pushed from above and below, the progressives never were able to fully capture the cultural high ground – even among the middle class.

The end of the Progress Era came, according to McGerr, with the coming of the First World War. The war brought large numbers of progressives into the center of power, for they staffed all of the key war agencies. Mobilization’s need to reshape Americans allowed progressives to transform American society as never before. But here the progressives overreached. Most Americans did not want to reshaped or transformed. This led, in turn, to a backlash – a “return to normalcy.” With World War 1, the progressives had left their mark on American society and culture but they’d also undone their own movement. Future generations of reformers and liberals would not be as radical as the progressives. For all the change they sought to American life they would not seek to reform it so utterly.

Michael McGerr is admirably skeptical of the progressive movement but his book is still structured around the declension narrative that so marks much of the scholarship on the Progressive Era. Despite their deep flaws, argues McGerr, something was undeniably lost with the fall of the progressives. “The epic of reform at the dawn of the twentieth century,” suggests McGerr, “helps explain the less-than-epic politics at the dawn of the twenty-first.”[4] Never since has such a radical political movement, so willing to challenge American values and norms, gained traction in American political life. With all of the deep flaws of progressivism, which McGerr does such a valuable job stressing, one cannot help but be relieved.

TIE-IN: Agreeing with Rodgers, McGerr sees WWI as a key turning point in the Progressive Era. Disagreeing with Rodgers, McGerr does not see the New Deal as an extensive of progressivism. Agreeing with Brinkley, McGerr argess that New Deal reform was not as radical as progressive reform. McGerr and Freund both stress the racist aspects of progressivism.

            In his tome Atlantic Crossings, Daniel Rodgers seeks to reconceptualize our understanding of America’s famous and often-studied “Progressive Era” by arguing that Progressive reform wasn’t particularly American. The reformers of the early decades of the twentieth century – from Jane Addams to Franklin Roosevelt – were working as part of international reform movement in the Atlantic world. Rodgers’ pushes his argument further than that insight, however, and suggests that Progressive ideas weren’t particularly American but, rather, had their origins in Europe. This “transatlantic progressive connection,” to Rodgers, argues against American “exceptionalism” for in the world of “social politics” Americans were often behind the times, perhaps even backwards.

In Atlantic Crossings, Rodgers hones in on the world of ideas in this “transatlantic progressive connection” and traces how political ideas traversed back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. Rodgers takes a broad left-liberal approach to defining that always-slippery group historians call “progressives.” Progressives, to Rodgers, range from reform socialists on one edge to welfare capitalists on the other – only communists are, truly, left out in the cold. What unites progressives in this account is a commitment to ideas that seek “to limit the social costs of aggressive, market capitalism.”[1] Indeed, “social politics’ key arena was where individual conscience came up hard against the cruelties, miseries, injustices, and inefficiencies of modern life.”[2] Rodgers, also, addresses an admirably broad swath of reform efforts – from workers’ insurance, to urban planning, to farmers’ cooperatives.

Atlantic Crossings has a relatively stable structure that flows through the nearly all of the text. The beginning of a chapter addresses the European origins (largely German and British) and circumstances of a set of reform ideas, say urban planning, while the second half the chapter addresses the American implications of the European importation of these ideas. Virtually every progressive reform movement had a limited impact on American politics, economics, and society. On the western side of the “transatlantic progressive connection” reform was always incomplete. To return to our urban planning example, of multitude of ideas in reshaping urban space only zoning had most thoroughgoing success in the United States. Nothing emerged out of the “transatlantic progressive connection” unchanged and unmodified but, Rodgers stresses, all of those movements and ideas had their “geneses” in that intellectual network.

Rodgers’ narrative has three distinct phases. The first, from the last decades of nineteenth century to the First World War the formative period of progressivism. Here progressive reformers first began to bring over the ideas generated by the intellectual and social ferment of Europe to America.  The “transatlantic progressive connection” was particularly German in this phase, with reformers and intellectuals (such as Richard Ely) educated in the great German universities returning with their heads full of critiques of laissez faire economics. Reformers had limited success in this phase and constantly faced backlash and the reforms they were able to implement were distorted in their new American context – perhaps beyond recognition. For example, Ely faced discrimination in the academy for his views (and had to rework them to stay employed) and public housing became tied to poor relief and not to uplift of the working class (as in Europe).

The second phase of Atlantic Crossings’ narrative covers the period of the First World War and its aftermath. World War I and the mobilization’s “war collectivism” saw progressives get their first real taste of power and success. Progressives were brought into the new government agencies and reforms gained more traction than anytime earlier years of the twentieth century. As intoxicating as this newfound entrance into the center of power could be, progressives overreached. They had too much faith in how much “reconstruction” the American people would stand in the war’s aftermath. As Rodgers puts it, “Progressives inspired by the war’s collectivist experiments wrongly presumed that the extraordinary policy learning of 1917 and 1918 would be permanent.”[3] This overreach led to a backlash – in the form of the Red Scare – and a return of the progressives to the policy wilderness. The war, obviously, also marked the end of the German phase of progressivism’s internationalism.

The final phase of Rodger’s narrative is the New Deal years and the Second World War. Progressives spent the interwar years far from the halls of power, in Rodger’s narrative, but the crisis of the Great Depression ushered them back in. Their years in the political and policy wilderness had built up a “logjam” of policy innovations that rushed forth onto the agenda upon the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This “logjam,” to Rodgers, explains the contradictory and multifaceted nature of the New Deal. Over a generation of ideas and policies had built up and during the 1930s and with the New Deal“[t]he American tortoise became a hare.”[4] The New Deal is, to Rodgers, a cumulation of the Progressive Era and “transatlantic progressive connection” but it is also marks that connection’s end. With World War 2, Americans saw that Europe had destroyed itself and the United States swung to its rescue. On top of the world – politically, intellectually, and economically – at the end of the war, the “phoenix of exceptionalism” was on the rise. The generation of reformers and liberals after the war “no longer marched toward the future with an eye cocked on their western European competitors.”[5] America had a lot to teach the world but the world had little to teach it.

The story Daniel Rodgers tells in Atlantic Crossings is a heroic one. This is not the tome to turn to see the darker side of progressivism – reformers support of segregation, prohibition, or eugenics. Indeed, it is not the place to turn to learn much about the role of women or African-Americans in progressivism or the progressive world of ideas. Many individual women (such as Jane Addams and Francis Perkins) and a few African-Americans (mainly W.E.B Dubois) are discussed for their individual actions but the overall place of these groups in the “transatlantic progressive connection” remains largely untouched by Rodgers. The formation of the NAACP gets a single mention and the suffrage and temperance movements even less.

In the end, Rodgers’ book is somewhat persuasive but also a ponderous and over-argued doorstopper. It is impossible to walk away from Atlantic Crossings unconvinced that there was an important international element to progressive reform. But is that international element the primary explanatory force behind progressivism? I remain unconvinced. It seems that after reading chapter after chapter of Euro-American progressive exchange, that too much was changed in the political and intellectual process of importation for the international element of progressivism to have much explanatory power. If every progressive reform was fundamentally altered in the American context, should the “transatlantic progressive connection” be ranked high in our list of causal elements? Perhaps not. While it is difficult, I believe, to argue that American progressivism was “exceptional” – particularly with its many shortcomings – it certainly was peculiar and deeply American; just as German progressivism was peculiar and deeply German, as was French progressivism, Danish progressivism, and British progressivism.

TIE-IN: Rodger’s assessment of Progressivism and the New Deal lines up well with Alan Brinkley’s End of Reform – in that the New Deal marked the end of something, a loss of the reforming edge. Although Michael McGerr is more negative towards progressivism as a whole, he lines up well with Rodger’s assessment that the First World War was a turning point.

Righteous Indignation: Religion and the Populist Revolution by Joe Creech

For generations historians have been attempting to cut “the Populist knot.” This vast field of historical literature has been dominated for decades by three warring interpretations of this (in)famous late nineteenth century political movement. The first interpretation, which could perhaps be called the “liberal school”, posits that the Populists were just another American liberal reform movement, a forerunner to twentieth century Progressivism. An opposed school, made famous by Richard Hofstadter, sees Populists as rural reactionaries and not proto-progressives or liberals but as proto-McCarthyites. The third interpretation, embodied by the work of Lawrence Goodwyn, sees Populism as the last great attempt at true American democracy; with Populism’s failure true American democracy breathed its last breath. Joe Creech attempts to cut through his scholarly knot by combining aspects of all three interpretations through looking at southern Populism’s religious core.

Creech argues that, fundamentally, southern Populism was a political and evangelical Christian movement. While not all southern Populists were evangelical, the movement was rooted deeply in evangelical culture, concerns, and even Populism’s non-evangelical members and advocates spoke in an evangelical discourse As a corollary to this evangelical perspective, Creech argues that Populists were “Christian reconstructionists.” They sought to bring southern and American society back in line with God’s choosen path – agrarian, localized, Christian, yeoman Jeffersonian (or in the case of African-American Populists, Lincolnian) democracy. Creech’s final insight is to argue that while Populists had economic concerns, they primarily saw the solutions to these problems as not being economic but as being political and religious. Changing political institutions and infusing society with Christian values would solve Populists’ economic woes.

This evangelical frame allows Creech to bring in aspects of all three of the above interpretations into his argument. The “liberal school” was correct to see Populists is as progressive/liberal reformers who sought to make American society more just, but Hofstadter was also right to view Populists as reactionaries for their sense of history was a narrative of declension – they wanted to return America to its more godly past.  Goodwyn was right as well, for Creech sees “the demise of Populism also brought with it the loss of a uniquely democratic vision of America.”[1] The idea that the voice of the people was the voice of God was discredited, at least for now.

Creech is quick to note that Populist’s enemies (and the ultimate victors) in the conservative branch of the Democratic Party were evangelicals as well. Populists and their foes present, to Creech, two positions on the evangelical spectrum. Populists were “countercultural” evangelicals who challenged the political and social norms of their society in the name of a radical, decentralized Christianity. Populism’s foes were “conservative” evangelicals who sacralized the present and saw Populists as challenging a godly order. From this perspective the defeat of the Populists had dire consequences for the history of Christianity in American – especially in the south.

In his book Creech is not just intervening in the historiography of Populism but in the broader history of nineteenth century American Protestantism. For at least two generations, historians of American Church history have attempted to puzzle out how optimistic, post-millennialist, reform-minded antebellum evangelical Protestantism morphed into pre-millenialist, dire, conservative twentieth century evangelical Protestantism. Creech argues that the defeat of Populism is a key explanatory device for this massive and important shift. Creech sees the Populists as the heirs to the optimistic, post-millennialist, reform-minded antebellum evangelicalism.[2] Their total defeat at the hands of their conservative foes was profoundly disillusioning; society had rejected God’s vision. This disillusionment left Populist evangelicals open to recruitment pre-millennialist holiness movements or pushed them towards disengagement from the political world and to focus solely on church life.  In this disillusionment, then, is the origin of the shift between nineteenth and twentieth century evangelicalism.

TIE-IN: Creech profoundly disagrees with the prospective of Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision. Postel sees Populists as modernists, seeking to bring the benefits of modern life and economics to the common man on the common man’s terms, while Creech sees them as seeking to restore a lost Christian past. Despite their difference in kind, Creech lines up well with Lawrence Goodwyn’s work on Populism.

Colored Property: State Policy & White Racial Politics in Suburban America by David M.P. Freund

David Freund begins his books with brief descriptions of two riots: one in 1925 where whites attacked a black family that sought to move into their urban Detroit and another riot in 1963 where a white mob attacked a white man for selling his suburban Dearborn home to a black family. On the surface these two riots have a lot in common, with whites attempting to exclude blacks from their segregated communities, but as Freund argues the differences between the 1925 riot and its 1963 counterpart show a complete sea change in white racism. While the whites of the 1925 violent outbreak couched their actions in the language of white biological superiority to supposedly inferior blacks – “scientific racism” – their 1963 successors saw themselves as defending their property against black assertions of unearned privilege and an attack property values – a sort of new cultural and economic racism. Strongly emphasizing that the shift in discourse from ideas of racial difference to more economic and cultural difference was a shift from one racial discourse to another (not as some scholarship would put it, as a shift from racism to “market” forces driving segregation), Freund explains how property came to be “colored” in the post-War United States.

Freund argues that this shift was driven by two interrelated factors: the expansion of the definition of “whiteness” and the political and racial economy of the housing and mortgage market. Freund shows that from the 1920s onwards there was a marked expansion of what it meant to be “white” in the United States. Beginning in the 1920s but skyrocketing, with the aid of the federal government, in the post-War years, the edifice of “whiteness” as exclusive WASPy was toppled as previously degraded Catholics, Jews, and Southern and Eastern Europeans “earned” their whiteness with post-War prosperity bringing them firmly into the middle class. Linked to this broad-based “whiteness” were the massive post-War expansion of the white homeownership and the massive expansion of segregated suburbs.
The political and racial economy of the American housing and mortgage markets has its origins in the 1920s. The first generation of professional mortgage brokers, real estate brokers, and urban planners read their racial assumptions into the newly codified zoning and real estate laws. These men, and their students, then staffed the federal housing and urban planning agencies of the New Deal (and beyond) that massively helped drive the post-War mortgage and housing market, which promoted a segregated suburbia that favored the expanded “white” middle class. Since the racist assumptions of this new market were submerged in a discourse of “the market”, this encouraged those that benefited from the post-War housing policy to think of themselves not as beneficiaries of a racist, government driven economic order but of a rational “market” that was rewarding their good behavior and punished those who behaved inappropriately. Additionally, the submerged racist assumptions of the mortgage market helped housing segregation survive attacks on the more explicit forms of racism that birthed it.

This created a perfect storm of invidious racism. Whites saw black attempts at integration as an interference not with an injustice, but with the “free market,” The post-War housing and mortgage market, in full, “helped give rise to a new kind of racial politics, in which northern whites learned to view inequality-racial inequality, in particular-wholly as a product of free market forces unaffected by legal constraints, political interventions, or coercive action of any kind.”[1] In many ways this sort of racism is even more evil than more “scientific” or “biological” racism because those are explicit racisms.

Throughout his book Freund is making three important historiographical interventions. First, he is arguing against the grain of the history of race in America. Traditionally, “scientific racism” is viewed as the most toxic sort of racism for it quantifies racial difference in the body and views racial differences as inescapable. In this story, then, more cultural and economic forms of racism become superior, in that they are easier to combat because they are mutable. Cultural and economic differences can be bridged, biological ones cannot. Freud turns this logic on its head. In his story, cultural and economic racism is worse for it isn’t explicitly racist. “Scientific racism” can be battled by advances in science while the sort of racism that underpins our modern housing and mortgage market has proven difficult to root out.

Freund’s second intervention is build upon those scholars who are pushing back against the idea of a “white backlash” undoing the New Deal/Great Society coalition in the 1960s and, certainly in, the 1970s. He ably notes that a backlash to any sort of integration was there from day one, from the 1920s until the 1970s. In fact he goes further than most and argues that most whites were never onboard for racial reform. Thus political change in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s is not the story of a supposedly racially liberal Democratic white middle class becoming more racist as the cultural excesses of those decades but instead it becomes the story of constantly racist white middle class abandoning an increasingly racially liberal Democratic party.

Freund’s final historiographical intervention is against the argument that the unique spatial organization of the suburbs is what caused racial segregation in the post-War years. This argument posits that the isolated and anatomizing nature of the post-War suburbs drove segregation. Freund aptly shows that this is not true. Segregation was present from day one in suburban growth, even in the earliest years when the suburbs were spatially no different from the urban area from which they grew.

TIE-IN: Despite his vehement paeans to the otherwise, Freund’s book mostly lines up with Tom Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis. Their basic narrative points are the same; the white backlash was there from day one, politics and federal policy were driving forces in racial inequality, etc. Perhaps, Sugrue emphasizes economics over racism but their basic conclusions and arguments are the same. Freud does push up against Judith Stein’s more optimistic take on post-War politics. Though they do agree that post-War policy makers’ failure to address racial problems as economic ones is what led to continued inequality between whites and blacks.

Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown by Kevin J, McMahon

How are we to explain the beginnings of the collapse of legal segregation in the middle of decades of twentieth century? Previous interpretations, according to Kevin McMahon, have placed too much stress on the idiosyncratic character of justices, the political pressure of activist groups, or the sweep of history in explaining the origins of Brown vs. the Board of Education.  McMahon argues that too little attention has been given to institutions, particularly the “judicial policy” of the president and its ability to reshape the Court. Further more McMahon stresses the important role FDR’s “judicial policy” played in furthering the cause of civil rights and setting the stage for Brown.

Too little scholarly attention to Franklin Roosevelt’s positive civil rights record – towards African-Americans at least. Modern historical and political science scholarship stresses the missed opportunities and the discrimination against African-Americans in many cornerstone New Deal programs. McMahon turns all this on its head. He argues that FDR was as upset as his modern scholarly critics at the racial shortcomings of New Deal reform. Thus he turned to “judicial policy” to remedy legislative failures to work against segregation.

To McMahon the Roosevelt administration was committed to reforming American political institutions in ways that were economically progressive and placed “rights-centered liberalism” at its core. The Democratic Party, with its large racist and conservative southern wing, was an imperfect instrument for this agenda. Thus a large part of Roosevelt’s agenda was reforming the institutions of government to correct these problems. On the level of popular politics and legislative agenda, Roosevelt was mostly a failure. His attempt to purge Southern conservatives from the party in 1938 was an abysmal failure along with the court-packing scheme. Thus Roosevelt turned to “judicial policy” as a long-term lever to reform the Democratic Party and American institutions along “rights-centered liberal” lines.

“Judicial policy” goes beyond simply whom FDR appointed to the Supreme Court but extends to the legal culture the administration promoted and, most importantly, the activities of the Roosevelt Justice Department. These three primary mechanisms of “judicial policy” worked together to lay the groundwork for Brown and the gradual collapse of the legal props for segregation. By appointing liberals to the court, by shaping a legal culture that promoted a culture that was “deferential” to the other political branches, and employing a Justice Department that made clear that the Presidency was committed to supporting the expansion of civil rights, the Roosevelt administration set the pattern that would shape the “judicial policy” of the more celebrated Truman and Eisenhower administrations.

TIE-IN: In the importance of “rights-centered liberalism” to the Roosevelt administration, McMahon lines up well with Brinkley’s The End of Reform. McMahon contrasts strongly with Michael Klarmen’s From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, especially with Klarmen’s stress on backlash, the importance of legislative activity to sustained social change, and more contextual approach.

            Somewhat ironically, the extremely difficult economic times of the 1930s saw the American labor movement realize its greatest successes. Previous decades had seen labor make brief gains that were quickly washed away in a flood of economic disaster, vehement employer opposition, and working class divisions by race and ethnicity. But during the Great Depression and the New Deal things changed, worker solidarity increased and energetic new organizers of the CIO were able to make sustained gains only dreamed of in earlier decades. Lizabeth Cohen seeks to explain this radical reverse of labor’s fortunes by closely examining the lives of workers – of all races, ethnicities, and genders, inside and outside of the workplace – in Chicago during the 1920s and 1930s.

Cohen’s explanation of labor’s reversal of fortune has three elements: the Great Depression, the rise of mass consumption among workers, and the CIO. In Cohen’s assessment the Depression smashed to pieces the elements of working class life that had worked to prevent the development of a unified working class culture. Before the Depression “working class families had depended for their welfare needs on informal networks and formal organizations of their ethnic communities and less reliably on their welfare capitalist employers.”[1] They lived in homogenous ethnic communities and patronized their local entertainments and shopping. Economic catastrophe destroyed or significantly damaged this economic and cultural infrastructure of working people’s lives.

This created the economic and cultural space for the second aspect of Cohen’s explanation to take root: mass consumption by the working classes. With the working classes’ traditional economic and cultural outlets reeling from the Depression, working people turned to the only option left standing: mass culture. Working people began for the first time, in large numbers, to patronize “movie palaces,” chain stores, and other bastions of American mass culture. Traditionally this move is scene as a roadblock to working class organizing for “the assumption that mass culture was by definition homogenizing, depoliticizing, and ultimately a tool of the ruling class to control the masses.”[2] Cohen turns this argument around and argues it was this embrace of mass culture created the cultural space for the CIO, the final element of her explanation, to move in and organize the working classes in mass. Working class people for the first time had developed new identities that expanded beyond their ethnic or racial loyalties and included a shared experience of mass consumption. The CIO was able to use this as a cultural base to build a sense of broad based working class solidarity and “a culture of unity.”

The CIO’s ability to create and organize “a culture of unity” was remarkably broad in the 1930s. The CIO was able to not just transcend ethnic boundaries but racial ones as well.  While white and black working class unity did not survive the turmoil of the post-war period, Cohen notes that it is important to note the unity that was created in the 1930s, however fleeting it might have been. The only group that was mostly excluded from this new “culture of unity” was women. The CIO’s organizing strategies proved to be patriarchal and while women served as important symbols in the movement, in actual practice they were marginalized.

Cohen ends her narrative in 1939 with the coming of the war, thus excluding from her narrative the set backs to unity among ethnic whites and African-Americans and Hispanic works of the war years and afterwards. This is a purposeful intellectual move on her part, for she is trying to stress the innovation and potential of this period, in contrast to the darker years of the 1920s and earlier. This decision, however admirable, does open the book up to being criticized as an examination of a brief period that was all sound and fury but ended up signifying nothing. That said, Cohen’s book is a powerfully argued and a very convincing account of working class organizing during the Great Depression.

TIE-IN: In her stress on the move towards a political economy of consumption – as opposed to reforming capitalism – Cohen lines up well with Alan Brinkley’s The End of the Reform. Her account of the 1930s hooks up well with that in Nelson Lichtenstein’s State of the Union, especially with its stress on the possibility of a working class “culture of unity” which cuts across racial and ethnic lines.

State of the Union: A Century of American Labor by Nelson Lichtenstein

The fortune of organized labor in the United States has waxed and wane to a considerable degree; from the repression of early days of the twentieth century, by the century’s middle decade the labor movement managed to claw its way into a prominently place in the political and economic order. Labor’s day in the sun did not forever, however. By the century’s end, labor had lost most of its social and political capital and its membership was shorn down to an increasing negligible amount of the private sector labor force.  In his powerful and affecting book, Nelson Lichtenstein seeks to narrate and explain this story.

Lichtenstein’s story can be broken into five chronological parts. The first is the Progressive Era – the first time labor made real gains on the national scene. This era is important because it was the first time two concepts central to Lichtenstein’s narrative – “industrial democracy” and “social wage” – were developed. In his view “industrial democracy” is the attempt to translate traditional American values of liberty, independence, and the pursuit of happiness into the industrial world; this means a stress on solidarity and democracy in the workplace. The “social wage” is “that portion of the working class standard of living that did not derive from wages or from corporate beneficence.” During the Progressive Era, the “social wage include[d] monetary entitlements such as pensions, unemployment insurance, and workingman’s compensation” but also meant public services like “public education, city parks, mandated vacations, municipal services, health and safety regulations, minimum wage, child labor laws, and women’s protective laws.” In a more modern context the “social wage” includes accesses to health insurance, poverty relief, and public housing.[1] Lastly, Lichtenstein argues, importantly, that Progressive reformers did not view what they termed “the Labor Question” as an isolated economic or market problem, but instead they saw labor issues a organically interlocked with the rest of society; thus answers to the “the Labor Question” where part and parcel to the answers Progressives had to “the Social Question,” more broadly.

The rest of Lichtenstein’s narrative can be boiled down to the successes and failures of the labor movement in raising the “social wage.” The second phase is the period of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and through the Second World War. It is here that labor, in many ways, made its greatest gains in expanding the “social wage” and towards “industrial democracy” – with implementation of reforms like Social Security and the Wagner Act. The third phase, between the 1947 and 1960, is what most historians think of as the golden age of American labor movement – what Paul Krugman terms the “Great Compression” – and cooperation between capital and labor. Here Lichtenstein provides a deeply revisionist account of these years, arguing that it was far from a golden age. This was a period of internal strife and bitter strikes – including the largest in American history – and what whatever “accord” there was between labor and management “was a limited and unstable truce.”[2] Only the hindsight and rose-tinted perspective of the declining years of labor in the last decades of the twentieth century could paint this era as some sort of golden age.

The fourth phase of Lichtenstein’s narrative covers the period of labor’s decline and near collapse – the 1960s through 1992. Here Lichtenstein places the blame for labor’s loss of its former political, social, and economic standing not at the feet of its traditional foes – for they are always in opposition anyway – but instead, in the hands of the movement’s supposed “allies;” neo-liberals and the New Left. These “allies” viewed labor as some combination of just another interest group, a roadblock along the path to racial and gender equality, a tool of the state, or an undated holdover from an older economic time and thus “no longer a lever for progressive change.”[3] While “Big Labor” with its corruption, refusal to organize the unorganized, and self-destructive, monomaniac anticommunism gets a share of the blame, but Lichtenstein primarily blames the rights based liberalism and rhetoric of the middle decades of the twentieth century for declining “industrial democracy” and failures to raise the “social wage.” This brings us to the present (as of 2002), the final phase of Lichtenstein’s narrative. While the 1990s and early 2000s represented the waning of the labor movement nearly to the point of collapse, there were rays of hope. The election of a more reform minded and aggression AFL-CIO leadership portends a chance of labor’s revival.

Lichtenstein’s book has a strong proscriptive argument; even more so then most present minded histories. In short, he is calling for a return to Progressive era ideas of “industrial democracy” and a quest for an improved “social wage.” He hopes that the agenda of the “Sweeenyite leadership” of a revitalized AFL-CIO will be along lines similar to Progressive reform and the New Deal with an “open door to the cadres of the Left, welcome the new immigrates, carve out a distinctive political presence somewhat of the Democrats, and, above all, ‘organize the unorganized.’”[4] This aggressive pro-labor stance gives the book an admirably earnest quality but often gives Lichtenstein analytic problems. It feels, by the end of his impressively succinct narrative, that the labor movement can do no wrong. The errors, missteps, and ultimate fate of labor in the United States is not really in its own hands but in those of whatever enemy or failed ally Lichtenstein can conjure up at a particular moment in his narrative. Lichtenstein shows a willingness to often read certain groups – i.e. “Big Labor” – out of the true movement at key points and thus fail to fully wrestle with some of the darker elements of American working class – especially white working class- culture and life.

All of that said, State of the Union is an important and powerful book, which mostly convincingly synthesizes nearly a hundred years of a labor history into a single, accessible volume.

TIE-IN: State of the Union fits awkwardly with the rest of the books assigned for the exam. In arguing that Progressives saw the “Labor Question” as part of a broader “Social Question,” Lichtenstein lines up well with Dan Rodger’s Atlantic Crossings. In viewing the 1940s and 1950s as an illusionary golden age, he also lines up well with Tom Sugrue’s Origins of the Urban Crisis. Lichtenstein contrasts with Judith Stein’s argument in Running Steel, Running America that the 1950s and 1960s were expansive times but lines up more with her argument that the labor movement’s vision was expansive enough to include African-Americans and other previously excluded groups and that liberalism’s political failures can be laid at the feet up political leaders and policymakers.

The Age of Reagan A History, 1974-2008 by Sean Wilentz

When did America become a nation dominated, politically, by conservatives? A powerful and popular narrative is that the Nixon administration marks the turning point in American political history – with a backlash by a “silent majority” of white evangelicals and business reacting against the “excesses” of 1960s liberalism. Wilentz seeks to revise that narrative by pushing it back to the Reagan years – where the New Deal order collapsed and a new conservative “Age of Reagan” arose in its place.

In Wilentz’s view, the Nixon years were just a prologue to the more fully transformative Reagan years. It was during the Reagan administration that the elements of modern conservative government were fully in place – tax cuts, a prominent role of Christian evangelicals, deregulation, and perennial corruption. While in practice Reagan’s actual list of conservative accomplishment is rather short and he was forced to compromise with a Democratic Congress (i.e. raising taxes), it was during the 1980s that the dam holding back conservatism broke. When Reagan ambled off the national stage in 1988, the next 20 years of American political history would be dominated by the conservative agenda.

From this view Wilentz presents a revisionist account of the Clinton years. From Wilentz’s pen, Clinton becomes not a neo-liberal or DINO, but a liberal leader desperately fighting to preserve what he can of the New Deal and Great Society. Here welfare reform becomes not a great conservative victory but an attempt for Clinton to salvage a vital legacy of the days when liberalism reigned. Wilentz argues that the “Age of Reagan” reached both its pinnacle and nadir in the years of George W. Bush. Here the elements of conservatism, noted above, played out to the point of farce. While Bush and his allies scored massive victories, more than Reagan was able to accomplish, the coalition of business, Christian evangelicals, nominal libertarians, and neo-conservatives was coming apart under the pressure of two wars, economic collapse, rampant corruption and environmental devastation.

This book has two large problems. The first problem is that much of this book is a large-scale apologia for the Clintons. Wilentz’s account of the Clinton year is far from open-minded and detached, he never misses an opportunity to portray Bill Clinton as a true liberal making the best of a difficult situation, damn the facts. A serious discussion of neo-liberalism is not to be found in these pages. Secondly, the 2008 election hangs heavily over this book. Wilentz wrote it in the most intense days of the Clinton/Obama Democratic primary and thus the shade of Barack Obama looms large. Wilentz’s casts Jimmy Carter as a proto-Obama “anti-politician” who failed because he refused to work the political process and sought to be a transformative leader outside of traditional political channels – a project doomed to failure. Contrast this with the ultimate politician Bill Clinton (who stands in here for his wife) who mastered the traditional levers of power and thus saved the legacy of the New Deal from extinction. This false contrast goes beyond presentism (which I have few problems with) and becomes a polemical mess.

TIE-IN: Wilentz’s book contrasts (somewhat) with Thomas Surgue’s assessment that the origins of conservatism can be traced to the 1940s and 1950s. It directly contrasts with Judith Stein’s argument that the pivotal decades are not the 1980s but the late 60s and early 1970s – the 1980s were just a product of liberalism’s failures in the earlier decades. Wilentz covers some of the same ground with his evil dopplegander – Donald Critchlow’s The Conservative Ascendancy.

Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation by Nancy F. Cott

Marriage has been a hot button issue for the last few decades of American history; first with battles of interracial marriage and now gay marriage. At the same time the naturalness of consensual, monogamous marriage remains unexamined in American public life and thinking. These assumptions about marriage seem to be in the very air most Americans breathe. In her powerfully argued and deeply insightful book, Nancy Cott drags these assumptions and their consequences into the analytic light.

Cott identifies three central features of marriage in American (from 1492 to the present): it has always been an institution supported by and defined by the state, it has been consensual and monogamous, and it has been central to “othering” minority groups and regulating ideas like race and gender. Marriage has never been a primarily religious institution in the United States, even during the colonial period. For example, the colonial period’s, arguably, most religious group – the Puritans – saw marriage as a state institution. This state-centered institution of marriage has made the legal establishment of families an important sphere of public policy. American governments have used the institution as a carrot and stick to shape its population in desired directions. This is not to say that Christianity has not had an important role in shaping American marriage as an institution. Two of its central features, monogamy and consensuality, are a legacy of Christianity.

In the American context these two features have helped shape what it means to be an American, thus marriage has a deeply political role to play. The consensual natural of American marriage has reinforced the republican and contractual nature of American government. From day one the link between consensual marriage and consensual governance have been mutually reinforcing. Monogamy has also helped regulate what a proper American should look like. It has helped exclude groups – such as Native Americans and, later, Mormons – who do not necessarily practice monogamous marriage customs. A respectable American was one who limited his or her sexuality to one partner through consensual, life-long monogamous marriage.

Governments’ marriage policies have also severed to regulate race and gender. From the colonial period to the present, regulations permitting whites to only marry whites, blacks to only marry blacks, and slaves and homosexuals not being able to marry at all has significantly aided in the construction of race and gender. Marriage laws and privileges and benefits they create, in many ways, are what define a respectable American.  Thus marriage has been a central site of conflict as excluded groups – such as former slaves and homosexuals – fight to enter the American mainstream.

Marriage in the United States has proved a remarkably adaptable institution. Many aspects of what Cott identifies as the foundational definition of marriage – “faithful monogamy, formed by the mutual consent of a man and a woman, bearing the impress of Christian religion and the English common law in its expectations for the husband to be the family head and economic provide, his wife the dependent partner” – have fallen away or been reshaped by cultural and economic change.[1] Marriage has become less of straightforward economic institution with the rise of companiable marriage in the nineteenth century; coverture has been weakened and, perhaps, toppled; interracial marriage is legally permissible; divorce is common and accessible; and now many are challenging the idea of marriage as between “one man and one woman.” Yet, marriage has also reshaped those who have sought to reshape the institution – the central values of American marriage, mutual consent and monogamy, have left their mark on American culture as much as changes in American culture has left is mark on marriage. Thus, despite its liberalization over time, marriage remains a powerful tool of public policy in shaping Americans to be a certain kind of people.

TIE-IN: This book is difficult to tie directly into any single book. However, changes in marriage can be an important sub-theme in any answer (about culture change, economic change, etc.). Cott’s argument about how ideas of mutual consent in marriage reinforce American republicanism tie well into Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic and Bernard Bailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution.

Thomas Schwartz’s Lyndon Johnson and Europe is an admirably direct and straightforward book. It has two closely tied arguments: that LBJ’s foreign policy was more just about Vietnam and war in Southeast Asia and that this broader foreign policy was, mostly, successful and humane. Schwartz is arguing against the ubiquitous image of Johnson as combination of the ultimate “Ugly American,” a warmonger, and an empty headed leader who took his lead from his much brighter aides and advisors.

Schwartz’s makes his revisionist case by focusing to Johnson’s policy towards Europe, NATO, the Soviet Union, and international monetary policy. Johnson’s accomplishments in this realm are many and quite laudable; the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the beginnings of détente with Soviet Bloc, greatly strengthening NATO after the French withdrawal, working to having West German take a larger role in its own defense, reforming the Bretton Woods system and moving towards abandoning the gold standard, successfully massaging the tense US/French relationship (wisely acting against his advisor’s position), and helping delay the devaluation of the pound and British withdrawal from the Suez. Schwartz suggests that many of the foreign policy accomplishments of Johnson’s successor, Nixon, so often lauded by historians and other commentators have their origins in the Johnson years. In Schwartz’ final assessment, LBJ was not a man without foreign policy convictions, instead he was driven by a “universalism” which saw  “people everywhere-despite their cultural or racial differences-had the same aspirations for peace, economic betterment for their families, and education for their children.”[1] If Franklin Roosevelt’s – Johnson’s hero – foreign policy was a New Deal for the World, than LBJ’s was a Great Society for the World.

Schwartz is arguing for a broad reconstruction of the historical image of Johnson – where the president’s domestic policy victories and his broader foreign policy successes outweigh his miserable failure in Vietnam. He wants us to bring LBJ’s reputation out of the shadow of Vietnam. As new generations of historians enter the field, with no memory of the war or its immediate fallout, such an intellectual move may be possible. Yet, there is a reason the shadow of Vietnam is so large and is nigh inescapable. The damage Vietnam inflicted on the national psyche, the American left, the politics of national security, and Americans’ trust in their governmental institutions runs deep. While the years have led to that wound scarring over, underneath claims that the “long national nightmare is over” it festers. As the last time these tensions exploded unto the national scene, during John Kerry’s 2004 campaign (just shy of 40 years after Johnson Americanized the war), more than clearly shows, Americans still have yet to fully recover from the war Johnson helped unleash. Thus while Schwartz’s revisionist account should cause us to rebalance our assessments of one of the 20^th century’s most divisive figures, the shadow of Vietnam still needs to loom large in our analysis.

TIE-IN: Schwartz’s assessment of LBJ is a direct attack on the position of Fredrick Logevall’s Choosing War. Logevall is directly cited in the text and notes as a key example of the school Schwartz is arguing against.