The Books of My Life: Changing the World

As Alan Dawley notes in his Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), the nature of American progressivism, which originated in the era between the 1890s to the 1920s, the period that is supposed to encompass, according to many American historians, the American Progressive Era, has been extensively debated by many of those same historians. Dawley's book is one of the latest tomes to take on the challenge of defining what American progressivism was and is.

Progressivism, as Dawley notes, has been defined in several ways by historians. Some historians, for example, see American progressives as those American political reformers trying to reign in the destructive aspects of the laissez-faire liberal capitalism wrought by the corporations that dominated the American Gilded Age from 1877 to the early 20th century. Others argue that progressives were nostalgic middle class Jeffersonian elites trying to take the United States back to the pastoralism that they believed dominated the nation before the Gilded Age. For still others progressives were older middle class elites who were attempting to regain the power and authority they had lost to the new corporate elites of the Gilded Age. Still others see progressives as the urban professional class trying to restore moral order in the face of challenges to it by urban political machines. To still others Progressivism was an effort by the urban political machine and their working class allies to expand their power and influence. Still others see the progressives as the promotors of ideas, ideas like pragmatism, that they hoped would change the world for the better. To still others progressivism was a movement of corporate elites and their bureaucratic allies who wanted to bring scientific and managerial order to the chaotic world of turn of the century American politics. To still others, progressivism was some or all of these.

For Dawley American progressivism, which lasted well after the Progressive Era ended with the Woodrow Wilson presidency, progressivism was initially a complex and not very cohesive movement that counted in its ranks Yankee Protestants, social gospelers, Jews, Catholics, secular Americans, the labour movement, ethnics practising mutual aid, economic managers, and female reformers. Progressivism was, according to Dawley, a social movement which centred around the key symbols of American efficiency, American millennialism, the utopian belief that American progressives could change America for the better, and American messianism, the utopian belief that Americans could unilaterally or in concert with other nations, particularly other Western nations, make the world a better place. As Dawley notes, these key cultural scripts or symbols intersected with a universe of other symbols circling them including ethnocentric, racist, and sexist symbols such as the White man's burden, civilisational uplift, and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP superiority, and calls, from some progressive quarters, for a more activist if still limited government, a limited redistribution of wealth, municipal ownership, the greater regulation of liberal free market capitalism, and the rethinking of America's role in the world to bring about a more orderly America and a more orderly world.

There are a number of things I liked about Dawley's approach to American progressivism. Dawley's book is sensitive to the dynamics of progressivism and how progressivism and its culture or meaning system was changed by what was happening in the US and what was happening in the world. Dawley argues, for instance, that American progressivism was not only a response to the seemingly chaotic and unequal world brought about in the land of equality for all by corporate laissez-faire liberal capitalism, but also a response to revolutions in Mexico and Russia and World War I and World War II.  Dawley's sensitivity to change at home and abroad allows him to explore the changes that progressivism underwent in the 20th and 21st centuries as a result of broader economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic forces. As Dawley notes, progressivism, which was a liberal social movement that shrank the gulf between liberalism and the radical left in its earlier form, became more internationalist, realist, and leftist after World War I, the horrors of which diminished utopian American millennialism and utopian American messianism among Progressives. Dawley is aware of and nicely utilises cultural approaches to social movements to flesh out the role meaning and meanings play in social movements and in the progressive social movement in particular. Dawley is particularly good at showing what historians still tend to minimise and at their peril, the impact of WASP religiously grounded culture on broader American culture. American millennialism and American messianism, both of which provided the cultural scaffolding for the myth of American exceptionalism and impacted the domestic and foreign policies of American economic and political elites. American millennialism and messianism didn't, after all, come out of nowhere.

Dawley's book is somewhat like progressivism itself, descriptive and normative, empirical and advocacy oriented. It attempts to describe the forces that gave rise to progressivism and it attempts to explore the culture and cultural contradictions of American progressivism from within a progressive tradition that, normatively, advocates for a more multicultural and internationalist progressivism. Dawley's book is a must read for anyone interested in the history of American social movements, for anyone interested in a more cultural sociological and cultural anthropological approach to the history of social movements, and for progressives wondering where progressivism came from, where it went, and where it might be going.