front cover of Alaska in the Progressive Age
Alaska in the Progressive Age
A Political History, 1896 to 1916
Thomas Alton
University of Alaska Press, 2019
The growth of modern-day Alaska began with the Klondike gold discovery in 1896. Over the course of the next two decades, as prospectors, pioneers, and settlers rushed in, Alaska developed its agricultural and mineral resources, birthed a structure of highway and railroad transportation, and founded the Alaska cities we know today. All this activity occurred alongside the Progressive Age in American politics. It was a time of widespread reform, as Progressive politicians took on the powerful business trusts and enacted sweeping reforms to protect workers and consumers.
Alaska in the Progressive Age looks at how this national movement affected the Alaska territory. Though the reigning view is that Alaska was neglected and even abused by the federal government, Alton argues that from 1896 to 1916 the territory benefitted richly in the age of Progressive Democracy. As the population of Alaska grew, Congress responded to the needs of the nation’s northern possession, giving the territory a delegate to Congress, a locally elected legislature, and ultimately in 1914, the federally funded Alaska Railroad.
Much has been written about the development of modern-day Alaska, especially in terms of the Gold Rush and the origins of the Alaska Railroad. But this is the first history to put this era in the context of Progressive Age American politics. This unexplored look at how Progressivism reached the furthest corners of the United States is an especially timely book as the Progressive Movement shows signs of affecting Alaska again.
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Americans All
The Cultural Gifts Movement
Diana Selig
Harvard University Press, 2008

From the 1920s—a decade marked by racism and nativism—through World War II, hundreds of thousands of Americans took part in a vibrant campaign to overcome racial, ethnic, and religious prejudices. They celebrated the “cultural gifts” that immigrant and minority groups brought to society, learning that ethnic identity could be compatible with American ideals.

Diana Selig tells the neglected story of the cultural gifts movement, which flourished between the world wars. Progressive activists encouraged pluralism in homes, schools, and churches across the country. Countering racist trends and the melting-pot theory of Americanization, they championed the idea of diversity. They incorporated new thinking about child development, race, and culture into grassroots programs—yet they were unable to address the entrenched forms of discrimination and disfranchisement faced by African Americans in particular. This failure to grasp the deep social and economic roots of prejudice ultimately limited the movement’s power.

In depicting a vision for an inclusive American identity from a diverse citizenry, Americans All is a timely reminder of the debates over difference and unity that remain at the heart of American society.

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Are We the 99%?
The Occupy Movement, Feminism, and Intersectionality
Heather McKee Hurwitz
Temple University Press, 2021

The protestors that comprised the Occupy Wall Street movement came from diverse backgrounds. But how were these activists—who sought radical social change through many ideologies—able to break down oppressions and obstacles within the movement? And in what ways did the movement perpetuate status-quo structures of inequality?  

Are We the 99%? is the first comprehensive feminist and intersectional analysis of the Occupy movement. Heather McKee Hurwitz considers how women, people of color, and genderqueer activists struggled to be heard and understood. Despite cries of “We are the 99%,” signaling solidarity, certain groups were unwelcome or unable to participate. Moreover, problems with racism, sexism, and discrimination due to sexuality and class persisted within the movement.  

Using immersive first-hand accounts of activists’ experiences, online communications, and media coverage of the movement, Hurwitz reveals lessons gleaned from the conflicts within the Occupy movement. She compares her findings to those of other contemporary protest movements—nationally and globally—so that future movements can avoid infighting and deploy an “intersectional imperative” to embrace both diversity and inclusivity.

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Atlantic Crossings
Social Politics in a Progressive Age
Daniel T. Rodgers
Harvard University Press, 2000

"The most belated of nations," Theodore Roosevelt called his country during the workmen's compensation fight in 1907. Earlier reformers, progressives of his day, and later New Dealers lamented the nation's resistance to models abroad for correctives to the backwardness of American social politics. Atlantic Crossings is the first major account of the vibrant international network that they constructed--so often obscured by notions of American exceptionalism--and of its profound impact on the United States from the 1870s through 1945.

On a narrative canvas that sweeps across Europe and the United States, Daniel Rodgers retells the story of the classic era of efforts to repair the damages of unbridled capitalism. He reveals the forgotten international roots of such innovations as city planning, rural cooperatives, modernist architecture for public housing, and social insurance, among other reforms. From small beginnings to reconstructions of the new great cities and rural life, and to the wide-ranging mechanics of social security for working people, Rodgers finds the interconnections, adaptations, exchanges, and even rivalries in the Atlantic region's social planning. He uncovers the immense diffusion of talent, ideas, and action that were breathtaking in their range and impact.

The scope of Atlantic Crossings is vast and peopled with the reformers, university men and women, new experts, bureaucrats, politicians, and gifted amateurs. This long durée of contemporary social policy encompassed fierce debate, new conceptions of the role of the state, an acceptance of the importance of expertise in making government policy, and a recognition of a shared destiny in a newly created world.

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Belle and Bob La Follette
Partners in Politics
Bob Kann
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008

The most famous couple in Wisconsin politics, "Fighting Bob" La Follette and his wife, Belle Case La Follette, come to life in the pages of the newest addition to the Badger Biographies series for young readers. In an accessible format that includes historic images, a glossary of terms, and sidebars explaining political concepts, students learn about Progressive politics and reform in the early 20th century through the experiences of this pioneering couple.

The father of "Progressive politics," Bob La Follette was famous for digging in his heels when it came to reforming government corruption. He also gained a reputation for fiery speeches on the campaign trail and on the Senate floor. Belle La Follette was political in her own right. The first woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin's Law School, she was an advocate for world peace and an agitator for the women's vote. She was also Bob's most trusted political advisor. Together, the couple raised a family and fought for the changes they believed would make the world a better place.

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Bernie Sanders and the Boundaries of Reform
Socialism in Burlington
W. J. Conroy
Temple University Press, 2016
Today, Bernie Sanders is a household name, a wildly popular presidential candidate and an icon for progressive Democrats in the United States. But back in the 1980s, this “democratic socialist”—though some folks would prefer the term “social democrat”—was mayor of Burlington, Vermont, where his administration attempted radical reforms. Some efforts were successful, but when a waterfront deal failed, it was not due to Sanders' efforts; he would rather compromise and have a net gain than be an ideological purist.
 
In his preface to this reissue of the 1990 book, Challenging the Boundaries of Reform, W. J. Conroy reflects on the recent legacy of Sanders, his Agenda for America, and his appeal to young voters. His book then looks back to identify Sanders’ experience in Burlington by examining several case studies that unfolded amidst a conservative trend nationally, an unsympathetic state government, and a hostile city council.
 
Ultimately, Conroy asks what lessons can be drawn from the case of Burlington that would aid the American left in its struggle to capture both government and civil society? 
 
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Black Georgia in the Progressive Era, 1900-1920
John Dittmer
University of Illinois Press, 1977
 "This is the best treatment scholars
  have of black life in a southern state at the beginning of the twentieth century."
  --  Howard N. Rabinowitz,
Journal of American History
"The author shows clearly and forcefully
  the ways in which this [white] system abused and controlled the black lower
  caste in Georgia." -- Lester C. Lamon, American Historical Review.
 
  "Dittmer has a faculty for lucid exposition of complicated subjects. This is
  especially true of the sections on segregation, racial politics, disfranchisement,
  woman's suffrage and prohitibion, the neo-slavery in agriculture, and the racial
  violence whose threat and reality hung like a pall over all of Georgia throughout
  the period." -- Donald L. Grant, Georgia Historical Quarterly.
 
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Boss Rule in South Texas
The Progressive Era
By Evan Anders
University of Texas Press, 1982

Four men played leading roles in the political drama that unfolded in South Texas during the first decades of this century:

  • James B. Wells, who ruled as boss of Cameron County and served as leading conservative spokesman of the Democratic Party in Texas;
  • Archer (Archie) Parr, whose ruthless tactics and misuse of public funds in Duval County established him as one of the most notoriously corrupt politicians in Texas history;
  • Manuel Guerra, Mexican American rancher and merchant whose domination of Starr County mirrored the rule of his Anglo counterparts in the border region;
  • John Nance Garner, who served the interests of these bosses of South Texas as he set forth on the road that would lead him to the United States vice-presidency.

Evan Anders's Boss Rule in South Texas tells the story of these men and the county rings they shaped in South Texas during the Progressive Era.

Power was the byword of the bosses of the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and Anders explores the sources of that power. These politicos did not shirk from using corrupt and even violent means to attain their goals, but Anders demonstrates that their keen sensitivity to the needs of their diverse constituency was key to their long-term success. Patronage and other political services were their lifeblood, and the allies gained by these ranged from developers and businessmen to ranchers and Mexican Americans, wealthy and poor.

Besides examining the workings of the Democratic machines of four South Texas counties, Anders explores the role of the Hispanic populace in shaping the politics of the border region, the economic development of the Lower Rio Grande Valley and its political repercussions, the emergence and nature of progressive movements at both local and state levels, and the part played by the Texas Rangers in supporting bossism in South Texas.

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City of Dignity
Christianity, Liberalism, and the Making of Global Los Angeles
Sean T. Dempsey
University of Chicago Press, 2023
City of Dignity illuminates how liberal Protestants quietly, yet indelibly, shaped the progressive ethics of postwar Los Angeles.
 
Contemporary Los Angeles is commonly seen as an American bulwark of progressive secular politics, a place that values immigration, equity, diversity, and human rights. But what accounts for the city’s embrace of such staunchly liberal values, which are more hotly contested in other parts of the country? The answer, Sean Dempsey reveals, lies not with those frequent targets of credit and blame—Democrats in Hollywood—but instead with liberal Protestants and other steadfast religious organizations of the postwar era.

As the Religious Right movement emerged in the 1970s, progressive religious activists quietly began promoting an ethical vision that made waves worldwide but saw the largest impact in its place of origin: metropolitan Los Angeles. At the center of this vision lay the concept of human dignity—entwining the integral importance of political and expressive freedom with the moral sanctity of the human condition—which suffused all of the political values that arose from it, whether tolerance, diversity, or equality of opportunity. The work of these religious organizations birthed such phenomena as the Sanctuary Movement—which provided safe haven for refugees fleeing conflict-torn Central America—and advocacy for the homeless, both of which became increasingly fraught issues amid the rising tides of neoliberalism and conservatism. City of Dignity explores how these interwoven spiritual and theological strands found common ground—and made common impacts—in the humanitarian ecosystem of one of America’s largest and most dynamic metro areas.
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Constitutional Morality and the Rise of Quasi-Law
Bruce P. Frohnen and George W. Carey
Harvard University Press, 2016

Americans are increasingly ruled by an unwritten constitution consisting of executive orders, signing statements, and other forms of quasi-law that lack the predictability and consistency essential for the legal system to function properly. As a result, the U.S. Constitution no longer means what it says to the people it is supposed to govern, and the government no longer acts according to the rule of law. These developments can be traced back to a change in “constitutional morality,” Bruce Frohnen and George Carey argue in this challenging book.

The principle of separation of powers among co-equal branches of government formed the cornerstone of America’s original constitutional morality. But toward the end of the nineteenth century, Progressives began to attack this bedrock principle, believing that it impeded government from “doing the people’s business.” The regime of mixed powers, delegation, and expansive legal interpretation they instituted rejected the ideals of limited government that had given birth to the Constitution. Instead, Progressives promoted a governmental model rooted in French revolutionary claims. They replaced a Constitution designed to mediate among society’s different geographic and socioeconomic groups with a body of quasi-laws commanding the democratic reformation of society.

Pursuit of this Progressive vision has become ingrained in American legal and political culture—at the cost, according to Frohnen and Carey, of the constitutional safeguards that preserve the rule of law.

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Defending the Masses
A Progressive Lawyer's Battles for Free Speech
Eric B. Easton
University of Wisconsin Press, 2018
Free speech and freedom of the press were often suppressed amid the social turbulence of the Progressive Era and World War I. As muckrakers, feminists, pacifists, anarchists, socialists, and communists were arrested or censored for their outspoken views, many of them turned to a Manhattan lawyer named Gilbert Roe to keep them in business and out of jail.

Roe was the principal trial lawyer of the Free Speech League—a precursor of the American Civil Liberties Union. His cases involved such activists as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger, Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, John Reed, and Eugene Debs, as well as the socialist magazine The Masses and the New York City Teachers Union. A friend of Wisconsin's progressive senator Robert La Follette since their law partnership as young men, Roe defended "Fighting Bob" when the Senate tried to expel him for opposing America's entry into World War I.

In articulating and upholding Americans' fundamental right to free expression against charges of obscenity, libel, espionage, sedition, or conspiracy during turbulent times, Roe was rarely successful in the courts. But his battles illuminate the evolution of free speech doctrine and practice in an era when it was under heavy assault. His greatest victory, including the 1917 decision by Judge Learned Hand in The Masses Publishing Co. v. Patten, is still influential today.
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Democracy in Print
The Best of The Progressive Magazine, 1909–2009
Edited by Matthew Rothschild
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
Democracy in Print captures many of the most influential voices from a century of United States history who have spoken out on the struggle to make real the promise of democracy for all Americans, railed against abuses of corporate power, renounced American empire, championed environmental causes, opposed war, and waged peace. It chronicles voices of the women’s rights movement, the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the gay rights movement. And on every page, it declares the importance of an independent media, by culling the best of The Progressive magazine over the last one hundred years.
    Readers will discover the vision of the magazine’s founder, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, and his suffragist wife, Belle Case La Follette. They’ll find historic gems from the likes of Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg, Huey Long, and John Kenneth Galbraith, and profound essays by Theodore Dreiser, Barbara Ehrenreich, Noam Chomsky, Upton Sinclair, Arundhati Roy, James Baldwin, Edwidge Danticat, and Edward Said. The collection is leavened with humor from Kate Clinton, Will Durst, Michael Feldman, and Molly Ivins, and graced by poems from such writers as Mahmoud Darwish, Rita Dove, Martín Espada, Maxine Kumin, Adrienne Rich, and Sandra Cisneros. Fascinating interviews bring readers into conversations with prominent cultural figures, including Chuck D, the Dalai Lama, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Goodman, Harold Pinter, Patti Smith, Susan Sarandon, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
    Eminently browsable, this book is for anyone concerned with American democracy, the global community, and the perils of the planet. With contributions by actors and Supreme Court justices, comedians and Nobel Prize-winners, Democracy in Print offers all readers nourishing food for thought.
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Drift and Mastery
An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest
Walter Lippmann, Introduction and notes by William E. Leuchtenburg, Foreword by Ganesh Sitaraman
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
In 1914, a brilliant young political journalist published a book arguing that the United States had entered a period of “drift”—a lack of control over rapidly changing forces in society. He highlighted the tensions between expansion and consolidation, traditionalism and progressivism, and emotion and rationality. He wrote to convince readers that they could balance these tensions: they could be organized, efficient, and functional without sacrificing impulse, choice, or liberty. Mastery over drift is attainable, Walter Lippmann argued, through diligent attention to facts and making active choices. Democracy, Lippman wrote, is “a use of freedom, an embrace of opportunity.”
            Lippman’s Drift and Mastery became one of the most important and influential documents of the Progressive Movement. It remains a valuable text for understanding the political thought of early twentieth-century America and a lucid exploration of timeless themes in American government and politics. Distinguished historian Walter Leuchtenberg’s 1986 introduction and notes are retained in this edition.
            Ganesh Sitaraman, who has provided a foreword for this centennial edition, suggests that Lippmann’s classic still has much to say to twenty-first-century progressives. The underlying solutions for our time, he believes, are similar to those of Lippman’s era. Sitaraman contends that American society can regain mastery over drift by reforming finance and reducing inequality, by rethinking the relationship between corporations and workers, and by embracing changes in social life.
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Ed Garvey Unvarnished
Lessons from a Visionary Progressive
Rob Zaleski
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Ed Garvey (1940–2017) was one of the most influential and colorful progressive politicians in Wisconsin's history. Growing up in what was a conservative rural town, he got his first taste of liberal activism at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, became the first executive director of the National Football League Players' Union, led two spirited campaigns against Bob Kasten and Tommy Thompson, and eventually cofounded the Fighting Bob Fest.

Shortly before he died, Garvey expressed his views on everything in a series of detailed, no-holds-barred interviews with journalist Rob Zaleski. In his trademark witty, blunt, and often abrasive style, he offered his impressions of the political climate, worries about the environment, and Act 10 protests on Capitol Square. Garvey's candor during these conversations provides deeper insight into the personal highs and lows he experienced over his rich life. Diehard followers will fondly remember his energetic campaigns, but they may be surprised to learn of his long-simmering disappointment after those losses. Ever timely and meaningful, Garvey's words offer a path for how the Democratic Party, both within Wisconsin and nationally, can regain its soul.
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Educated by Initiative
The Effects of Direct Democracy on Citizens and Political Organizations in the American States
Daniel A. Smith and Caroline J. Tolbert
University of Michigan Press, 2004
"This body of research not only passes academic muster but is the best guidepost in existence for activists who are trying to use the ballot initiative process for larger policy and political objectives."
--Kristina Wilfore, Executive Director, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center and Foundation

Educated by Initiative moves beyond previous evaluations of public policy to emphasize the educational importance of the initiative process itself. Since a majority of ballots ultimately fail or get overturned by the courts, Smith and Tolbert suggest that the educational consequences of initiative voting may be more important than the outcomes of the ballots themselves. The result is a fascinating and thoroughly-researched book about how direct democracy teaches citizens about politics, voting, civic engagement and the influence of special interests and political parties. Designed to be accessible to anyone interested in the future of American democracy, the book includes boxes (titled "What Matters") that succinctly summarize the authors' data into easily readable analyses.

Daniel A. Smith is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida.

Caroline J. Tolbert is Associate Professor of Political Science at Kent State University.


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Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman's Point of View
New Thought Radicalism in Portland’s Progressive Era
Lawrence M. Lipin
Oregon State University Press, 2017
Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View is an intellectual biography of a long-forgotten radical female journalist in Portland, whose daily women’s columns provide a window into the breadth of intellectual radicalism in Progressive Era journalism. Baldwin was one of an early generation of female journalists who were hired to lure female readers to the daily newspaper’s department store advertisements. Instead of catering to the demands of consumerism, Baldwin quickly brought an anti-capitalist, antiracist agenda to her column, “The Woman’s Point of View." She eschewed household hints and instead focused on the immorality of capitalists and imperialists while emphasizing the need for women to become independent and productive citizens. 
 
A century before the Occupy movement and the Women’s March, Baldwin spoke truth to power. Imbued with a New Thought spirituality that presumed progressive thought could directly affect material reality, she wrote to move history forward. And yet, the trajectory of history proved as hard to forecast then as now.  While her personal story seems to embody a modern progressivism, blending abolition with labor reform and anti-banker activism—positions from which she never wavered—her path grew more complicated as times changed in the aftermath of World War I, when she would advocate on behalf of both the Bolsheviks and the Ku Klux Klan.
 
In this deeply researched and nuanced account of Eleanor Baldwin’s intellectual journey, historian Larry Lipin reveals how even the most dedicated radical can be overcome by unforeseen events. Eleanor Baldwin and the Woman’s Point of View restores a missing chapter in Portland’s Progressive Era history and rescues this passionate, intriguing, and quixotic character from undeserved obscurity.
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Fair Share
Senior Activism, Tiny Publics, and the Culture of Resistance
Gary Alan Fine
University of Chicago Press, 2023
A deeply researched ethnographic portrait of progressive senior activists in Chicago who demonstrate how a tiny public wields collective power to advocate for broad social change.
 
If you've ever been to a protest or been involved in a movement for social change, you have likely experienced a local culture, one with slogans, jargon, and shared commitments. Though one might think of a cohort of youthful organizers when imagining protest culture, this powerful ethnography from esteemed sociologist Gary Alan Fine explores the world of senior citizens on the front lines of progressive protests. While seniors are a notoriously important—and historically conservative—political cohort, the group Fine calls “Chicago Seniors Together” is a decidedly leftist organization, inspired by the model of Saul Alinsky. The group advocates for social issues, such as affordable housing and healthcare, that affect all sectors of society but take on a particular urgency in the lives of seniors. Seniors connect and mobilize around their distinct experiences but do so in service of concerns that extend beyond themselves. Not only do these seniors experience social issues as seniors—but they use their age as a dramatic visual in advocating for political change.
 
In Fair Share, Fine brings readers into the vital world of an overlooked political group, describing how a “tiny public” mobilizes its demands for broad social change. In investigating this process, he shows that senior citizen activists are particularly savvy about using age to their advantage in social movements. After all, what could be more attention-grabbing than a group of passionate older people determinedly shuffling through snowy streets with canes, in wheelchairs, and holding walkers to demand healthcare equity, risking their own health in the process?

 
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Feeling Like a State
Desire, Denial, and the Recasting of Authority
Davina Cooper
Duke University Press, 2019
A transformative progressive politics requires the state's reimagining. But how should the state be reimagined, and what can invigorate this process? In Feeling Like a State, Davina Cooper explores the unexpected contribution a legal drama of withdrawal might make to conceptualizing a more socially just, participative state. In recent years, as gay rights have expanded, some conservative Christians—from charities to guesthouse owners and county clerks—have denied people inclusion, goods, and services because of their sexuality. In turn, liberal public bodies have withdrawn contracts, subsidies, and career progression from withholding conservative Christians. Cooper takes up the discourses and practices expressed in this legal conflict to animate and support an account of the state as heterogeneous, plural, and erotic. Arguing for the urgent need to put new imaginative forms into practice, Cooper examines how dissident and experimental institutional thinking materialize as people assert a democratic readiness to recraft the state.
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Fighting Bob La Follette
The Righteous Reformer
Nancy C Unger
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2008
Now in paperback with a new preface, this comprehensive biography weaves the triumph and the tragedy of the public and private lives of the most famous of Wisconsin leaders, Robert "Fighting Bob" La Follette. As a U.S. representative, governor of Wisconsin, and U.S. Senator, La Follette's political legacies have been long lasting; among them are the election of senators by constituents, creation of the Department of Labor and the Federal Trade Commission, women's suffrage, and workers' compensation.
Through the personal letters, diaries, and documents of the La Follette family, Unger uses the private life of La Follette as a means for understanding the public figure. Thoroughly researched and documented, Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer is a testament to the progressive tradition in Wisconsin and its premier leader.
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Fighting Son
A Biography of Philip F. La Follette
Jonathan Kasparek
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2006

Former Wisconsin governor Philip F. La Follette forged a political path characterized by his progressive, innovative vision. Growing up in the shadow of revered senator "Fighting Bob" La Follette made for a politically charged childhood and laid the groundwork for Phil's emergence as a powerful figure in Wisconsin politics. A gregarious and fiery politician, Phil's efforts led to the passage of the country's first unemployment compensation act, aid programs for workers and farmers, and the reorganization of state government.

This approachable, comprehensive book traces La Follette's journey through public office as well as his life after the waning of the Progressive era. Phil La Follette’s is a history of continuing progressivism, of innovative solutions to social problems, and of loyalty to a political ethos that goes far beyond love of country. Kasparek's treatment of this Fighting Son is a monument not only to La Follette but to progressive politics in Wisconsin.

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The Gospel of Progressivism
Moral Reform and Labor War in Colorado, 1900-1930
R. Todd Laugen
University Press of Colorado, 2010
Chronicling the negotiations of Progressive groups and the obstacles that constrained them, The Gospel of Progressivism details the fight against corporate and political corruption in Colorado during the early twentieth century. While the various groups differed in their specific agendas, Protestant reformers, labor organizers, activist women, and mediation experts struggled to defend the public against special-interest groups and their stranglehold on Colorado politics.

Sharing enemies like the party boss and corporate lobbyist who undermined honest and responsive government, Progressive leaders were determined to root out selfish political action with public exposure. Labor unions defied bosses and rallied for government protection of workers. Women's clubs appealed to other women as mothers, calling for social welfare, economic justice, and government responsiveness. Protestant church congregations formed a core of support for moral reform. Labor relations experts struggled to prevent the outbreak of violence through mediation between corporate employers and organized labor. Persevering through World War I, Colorado reformers faced their greatest challenge in the 1920s, when leaders of the Ku Klux Klan drew upon the rhetoric of Protestant Progressives and manipulated reform tools to strengthen their own political machine. Once in power, Klan legislators turned on Progressive leaders in the state government.

A story of promising alliances never fully realized, zealous crusaders who resisted compromise, and reforms with unexpected consequences, The Gospel of Progressivism will appeal to those interested in Progressive Era reform, Colorado history, labor relations, and women's activism.

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Governors and the Progressive Movement
David R. Berman
University Press of Colorado, 2019

Governors and the Progressive Movement is the first comprehensive overview of the Progressive movement’s unfolding at the state level, covering every state in existence at the time through the words and actions of state governors. It explores the personalities, ideas, and activities of this period’s governors, including lesser-known but important ones who deserve far more attention than they have previously been given.

During this time of greedy corporations, political bosses, corrupt legislators, and conflict along racial, class, labor/management, urban/rural, and state/local lines, debates raged over the role of government and issues involving corporate power, racism, voting rights, and gender equality—issues that still characterize American politics. Author David R. Berman describes the different roles each governor played in the unfolding of reform around these concerns in their states. He details their diverse leadership qualities, governing styles, and accomplishments, as well as the sharp regional differences in their outlooks and performance, and finds that while they were often disposed toward reform, governors held differing views on issues—and how to resolve them.

Governors and the Progressive Movement examines a time of major changes in US history using relatively rare and unexplored collections of letters, newspaper articles, and government records written by and for minority group members, labor activists, and those on both the far right and far left. By analyzing the governors of the era, Berman presents an interesting perspective on the birth and implementation of controversial reforms that have acted as cornerstones for many current political issues. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of US history, political science, public policy, and administration.

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Home without Walls
Southern Baptist Women and Social Reform in the Progressive Era
Carol Crawford Holcomb
University of Alabama Press, 2020
A critical examination of the Woman’s Missionary Union and how it shaped the views of Southern Baptist women
 
The Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), founded in 1888, carved out a uniquely feminine space within the Southern Baptist Convention during the tumultuous years of the Progressive Era when American theologians were formulating the social gospel. These women represented the Southern Baptist elite and as such had the time to read, write, and discuss ideas with other Southern progressives. They rubbed shoulders with more progressive Methodist and Presbyterian women in clubs and ecumenical missionary meetings. Baptist women studied the missionary publications of these other denominations and adopted ideas for a Southern Baptist audience.

Home without Walls: Southern Baptist Women and Social Reform in the Progressive Era shows how the social attitudes of women were shaped at the time. By studying primary documents—including personal letters, official exchanges and memoranda, magazine publications, newsletters, and editorials—Carol Crawford Holcomb uncovers ample evidence that WMU leaders, aware of the social gospel and sympathetic to social reform, appropriated the tools of social work and social service to carry out their missionary work.

Southern Baptist women united to build a financial empire that would sustain the Southern Baptists through the Great Depression and beyond. Their social attitudes represented a kaleidoscope of contrasting opinions. By no stretch of the imagination could WMU leaders be characterized as liberal social gospel advocates. However, it would also be wrong to depict them as uniformly hostile to progressivism or ignorant of contemporary theological ideas. In the end, they were practical feminists in their determination to provide a platform for women’s views and a space for women to do meaningful work.
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The Honky Tonk on the Left
Progressive Thought in Country Music
Mark Allan Jackson
University of Massachusetts Press, 2018
Massively popular for the past century, country music has often been associated with political and social conservatism. While such figures as George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ted Cruz have embraced and even laid claim to this musical genre over the years, country performers have long expressed bold and progressive positions on a variety of public issues, whether through song lyrics, activism, or performance style.

Bringing together a wide spectrum of cultural critics, The Honky Tonk on the Left takes on this conservative stereotype and reveals how progressive thought has permeated country music from its beginnings to the present day. The original essays in this collection analyze how diverse performers, including Fiddlin' John Carson, Webb Pierce, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, O. B. McClinton, Garth Brooks, and Uncle Tupelo, have taken on such issues as government policies, gender roles, civil rights, prison reform, and labor unrest. Taking notice of the wrongs in their eras, these musicians worked to address them in song and action, often with strong support from fans.

In addition to the volume editor, this collection includes work by Gregory N. Reish, Peter La Chapelle, Stephanie Vander Wel, Charles L. Hughes, Ted Olson, Nadine Hubbs, Stephanie Shonekan, Stephen A. King, P. Renee Foster, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Travis D. Stimeling, and Jonathan Silverman.
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In Their Own Best Interest
A History of the U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans
Lars Schoultz
Harvard University Press, 2020

Winner of the William M. LeoGrande Prize

For over a century, the United States has sought to improve the behavior of the peoples of Latin America. Perceiving their neighbors to the south as underdeveloped and unable to govern themselves, U.S. policy makers have promoted everything from representative democracy and economic development to oral hygiene. But is improvement a progressive impulse to help others, or realpolitik in pursuit of a superpower’s interests?

“In this subtle and searing critique of U.S. efforts to ‘uplift’ Latin America, Lars Schoultz challenges us to question the fundamental tenets of the development industry that became entrenched in the U.S. foreign policy bureaucracy over the last century.”
—Piero Gleijeses, author of Visions of Freedom

“In this masterful work, Lars Schoultz provides a companion and follow-up to his classic Beneath the United States…A necessary and rewarding read for scholars and students of U.S. foreign policy and inter-American relations.”
—Renata Keller, The Americas

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Indispensable Outcasts
Hobo Workers and Community in the American Midwest, 1880-1930
Frank Tobias Higbie
University of Illinois Press, 2003

Often overlooked in labor history, the hoboes who rode the rails in search of seasonal work nevertheless secured a place in the American imagination. Frank Tobias Higbie weaves together history, anthropology, gender studies, and literary analysis to reposition these workers at the center of Progressive Era debates over class, race, manly responsibility, community, and citizenship. Combining incisive cultural criticism with labor history, Higbie illustrates how these so-called marginal figures were in fact integral to communities and to cultural conflicts over class, masculinity, and sexuality. He draws from life histories, the investigations of social reformers, and the organizing materials of the Industrial Workers of the World to present a complex portrait of hobo life, from its often violent and dangerous working conditions to its ethic of “transient mutuality” that enabled survival and resistance on the road. 

Frank and compelling,Indispensable Outcasts examines hoboes within the sprawling story of American labor while meditating on writing history from the bottom up and the ways a fascination with personal narrative can color a historian's work.

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John Bascom and the Origins of the Wisconsin Idea
J. David Hoeveler Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2017
In the Progressive Era of American history, the state of Wisconsin gained national attention for its innovative economic and political reforms. Amidst this ferment, the "Wisconsin Idea" was popularized—the idea that a public university should improve the lives of people beyond the borders of its campus.

During his term as governor (1901–1906), Robert La Follette routinely consulted with University of Wisconsin researchers to devise groundbreaking programs and legislation. Although the Wisconsin Idea is often attributed to a 1904 speech by Charles Van Hise, then president of the University of Wisconsin, David Hoeveler argues that it originated decades earlier, in the creative and fertile mind of John Bascom.

A philosopher, theologian, and sociologist, Bascom (1827–1922) deeply influenced a generation of students at the University of Wisconsin, including La Follette and Van Hise. Hoeveler documents how Bascom drew concepts from German idealism, liberal Protestantism, and evolutionary theory, transforming them into advocacy for social and political reform. He was a champion of temperance, women's rights, and labor, all of which brought him controversy as president of the university from 1874 to 1887. In a way unmatched by any of his peers at other institutions, Bascom outlined a social gospel that called for an expanded role for state governments and universities as agencies of moral improvement.

Hoeveler traces the intellectual history of the Wisconsin Idea from the nineteenth century to such influential Progressive Era thinkers as Richard T. Ely and John R. Commons, who believed university researchers should be a vital source of expertise for government and citizens.
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La Follette Insurgent Spirit
David P. Thelen
University of Wisconsin Press, 1986
Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit is a closely argued, lively, and readable biography of the central figure in the American Progressive movement. Wisconsin's “Fighting Bob” La Follette embodied the heart of Progressive sentiment and principle. He was a powerful force in shaping national political events between the eras of Populism and the New Deal
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The La Follettes of Wisconsin
Love and Politics in Progressive America
Bernard A. Weisberger
University of Wisconsin Press, 2013
The La Follettes of Wisconsin—Robert, Belle, and their children, Bob Jr., Phil, Fola, and Mary—are vividly brought to life in this collective biography of an American political family. As governor of Wisconsin (1901–06) and U.S. Senator (1906–25), "Fighting Bob" battled relentlessly for his Progressive vision of democracy—an idealistic mixture of informed citizenry and enlightened egalitarianism.
            By contrast, the private man suffered from intense, isolated periods of depression and relied heavily on his family for survival. Together, "Old Bob" and his beloved wife, Belle Case La Follette—a lawyer, journalist, and Progressive leader in her own right—raised their children in the distinctly uncompromising La Follette tradition of challenging social and political ills. Fola became a campaigner for women's suffrage, Phil was governor of Wisconsin, and "Young Bob" became a U.S. senator.
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Left in the Midwest
St. Louis Progressive Activism in the 1960s and 1970s
Amanda L. Izzo
University of Missouri Press, 2023

Despite St. Louis’s mid-twentieth-century reputation as a conservative and sleepy midwestern metropolis, the city and its surrounding region have long played host to dynamic forms of social-movement organizing. This was especially the case during the 1960s and 1970s, when a new generation of local activists lent their energies to the ongoing struggles for Black freedom, lesbian and gay liberation, feminist social transformations, environmental protection, an end to the Vietnam War, and more. This volume, the first of its kind, offers fifteen scholarly contributions that together bring into focus the exceptional range of progressive activist projects that took shape in a single midwestern city during these tumultuous decades.

In contrast to scholarship that seeks to interpret the era’s social-movement initiatives in a primarily national context, the works presented in this expansive collection emphasize the importance of locality, neighborhood, community institutions, and rooted social networks. Documenting wrenching forces of metropolitan change as well as grassroots resilience, Left in the Midwest shows us how place powerfully shaped agendas, worldviews, and opportunities for the disparate groups that dedicated themselves to progressive visions for their city. By revising our sense of the region’s past, this volume also expands our sense of the possibilities that the future may hold for activist movements seeking change in St. Louis and beyond.
 

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Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism
David Ciepley
Harvard University Press, 2007
This book argues that, more than any other factor, it was the encounter with totalitarianism that dissolved the ideals of American progressivism and crystallized the ideals of postwar liberalism. The New Deal began as a revolution in favor of progressive governance--executive-centered and expert-guided. But as David Ciepley shows, by the late 1930s, intellectuals and elites, reacting against the menace of totalitarianism, began to shrink from using state power to guide the economy or foster citizen virtues. All of the more statist governance projects of the New Deal were curtailed or abandoned, regardless of success, and the country placed on a more libertarian-corporatist trajectory, both economically and culturally. In economics, attempts to reorient industry from private profit to public use were halted, and free enterprise was reaffirmed. In politics, the ideal of governance by a strong, independent executive was rejected--along with notions of "central planning," "social control," and state imposition of "values"--and a politics of contending interest groups was embraced. In law, the encounter with totalitarianism brought an end to judicial deference, the embrace of civil rights and civil liberties, and the neutralist reinterpretation, and radicalization, of both. Finally, in culture, the encounter sowed the seeds of our own era--the era of the culture wars--in which traditional America has been mobilized against these liberal legal advances, and against the entire neutralist, "relativist," "secular humanist" reinterpretation of America that accompanies them.
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My Brother's Keeper
George McGovern and Progressive Christianity
Mark A. Lempke
University of Massachusetts Press, 2017
George McGovern is chiefly remembered for his landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972. Yet at the time, his candidacy raised eyebrows by invoking the prophetic tradition, an element of his legacy that is little studied. In My Brother's Keeper, Mark A. Lempke explores the influence of McGovern's evangelical childhood, Social Gospel worldview, and conscientious Methodism on a campaign that brought antiwar activism into the mainstream.

McGovern's candidacy signified a passing of the torch within Christian social justice. He initially allied with the ecumenical movement and the mainline Protestant churches during a time when these institutions worked easily with liberal statesmen. But the senator also galvanized a dynamic movement of evangelicals rooted in the New Left, who would dominate subsequent progressive religious activism as the mainline entered a period of decline. My Brother's Keeper argues for the influential, and often unwitting, role McGovern played in fomenting a "Religious Left" in 1970s America, a movement that continues to this day. It joins a growing body of scholarship that complicates the dominant narrative of that era's conservative Christianity.
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The New Freedom and the Radicals
Woodrow Wilson, Progressive Views of Radicalism, and the Origins of Repressive Tolerance
Jacob Kramer
Temple University Press, 2017
Radicals such as socialists, syndicalists, and anarchists are often thought of as marginal in American history. However, in the early decades of the twentieth century, progressives—those who sought to regulate big business, reduce class conflict, and ameliorate urban poverty—took the radicals’ ideas very seriously.

In The New Freedom and the Radicals, Jacob Kramer deftly examines how progressivism emerged at a time of critical transformation in American life. Using original archival sources, Kramer presents a study of Wilsonian-era politics to convey an understanding of the progressives’ views on radical America.

The New Freedom and the Radicals shows how the reactions of progressives to radicals accelerated the pace of reform in the United States, but how the movement was at times predisposed to repressing the radical elements to its left. In addition, Kramer asks to what extent progressives were responding to and influenced by those who opposed the state, capitalism, and the class structure altogether, as well as how progressives’ views of them changed in relation to events.
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The Novel and the American Left
Critical Essays on Depression-Era Fiction
Janet Galligani Casey
University of Iowa Press, 2004

The first collection of critical essays to focus specifically on the fiction produced by American novelists of the Depression era, The Novel and the American Left contributes substantially to the newly emerging emphasis on twentieth-century American literary radicalism. Recent studies have recovered this body of work and redefined in historical and theoretical terms its vibrant contribution to American letters. Casey consolidates and expands this field of study by providing a more specific consideration of individual novels and novelists, many of which are reaching new contemporary audiences through reprints.

The Novel and the American Left focuses exclusively on left-leaning fiction of the Depression era, lending visibility and increased critical validity to these works and showing the various ways in which they contributed not only to theorizations of the Left but also to debates about the content and form of American fiction. In theoretical terms, the collection as a whole contributes to the larger reconceptualization of American modernity currently under way. More pragmatically, individual essays suggest specific authors, texts, and approaches to teachers and scholars seeking to broaden and/or complicate more traditional “American modernism” syllabi and research agendas.

The selected essays take up, among others, such “hard-core"” leftist writers as Mike Gold and Myra Page, who were associated with the Communist Party; the popular novels of James M. Cain and Kenneth Fearing, whose works were made into successful films; and critically acclaimed but nonetheless “lost” novelists such as Josephine Johnson, whose Now in November (Pulitzer Prize, 1936) anticipates and complicates the more popular agrarian mythos of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

This volume will be of interest not only to literary specialists but also to historians, social scientists, and those interested in American cultural studies.

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Paul Wellstone
The Life of a Passionate Progressive
Bill Lofy
University of Michigan Press, 2005
"Paul Wellstone, we miss you. Few politicians, especially these days, are as willing to stand up and speak the truth as Wellstone was. In this era of flaccid rhetoric and pre-approved sound bites, he had the rare ability to ignite a fire in his audiences. Bill Lofy's excellent biography rekindles that fire and reminds us just how much politicians of Wellstone's honesty, character, and spine are needed---now more than ever. This book should inspire a new generation of voters and political leaders alike."
---Arianna Huffington, columnist and editor of HuffingtonPost.com

"This book captures the vibrant spirit of my friend Paul Wellstone---the fierce commitment to justice that defined his life, and that shapes his enduring legacy."
---U.S. Senator Russ Feingold

"Paul Wellstone was a great leader because he fused progressive idealism with a stubbornly pragmatic politics. Bill Lofy's book captures that dual commitment in his story of Wellstone's life, and also shows us the extraordinary human appeal that Wellstone emanated in his relationships with people in all walks of life. This book is an engaging read that also tells us a lot about the political practice to which we should aspire."
---Frances Fox Piven, author of The War at Home

"This vividly written book captures the life and personal qualities of the late Senator Paul Wellstone. In so doing it provides an illuminating gloss on Max Weber's seminal exposition of the political vocation. It is a jewel of a book."
-Fred Greenstein, Princeton University


Bill Lofy's fast-paced and readable biography tells the inspirational story of one of the most compelling figures in the history of American politics---Senator Paul Wellstone.

Yet Lofy's book is more than just the chronicle of Wellstone's life and political career; it's also an indispensable guide to what ails political life today. Readers politically inclined or not will find in its pages a handbook to the uncertain and often treacherous business of politics and a stirring example for living a courageous and honest life---whether as public servant or private individual.
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The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations
Robert David Johnson
Harvard University Press, 1995

This intensively researched volume covers a previously neglected aspect of American history: the foreign policy perspective of the peace progressives, a bloc of dissenters in the U.S. Senate, between 1913 and 1935. The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations is the first full-length work to focus on these senators during the peak of their collective influence. Robert David Johnson shows that in formulating an anti-imperialist policy, the peace progressives advanced the left-wing alternative to the Wilsonian agenda.

The experience of World War I, and in particular Wilson’s postwar peace settlement, unified the group behind the idea that the United States should play an active world role as the champion of weaker states. Senators Asle Gronna of North Dakota, Robert La Follette and John Blaine of Wisconsin, and William Borah of Idaho, among others, argued that this anti-imperialist vision would reconcile American ideals not only with the country’s foreign policy obligations but also with American economic interests. In applying this ideology to both inter-American and European affairs, the peace progressives emerged as the most powerful opposition to the business-oriented internationalism of the decade’s Republican administrations, while formulating one of the most comprehensive critiques of American foreign policy ever to emerge from Congress.

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Persistent Progressives
The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union
John F. Freeman
University Press of Colorado, 2015
Persistent Progressives tells the story of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union’s evolution from an early movement against monopolists and wholesalers to a regional trailblazer for agriculture ideologies built on social democracy, the family farmer, and cooperative enterprises. As a continuing advocate for saving the family farm, the Farmers Union legacy provides a unique window into the transformation of the agriculture and rural communities in Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico.

Using data spanning decades, author John Freeman covers the founding of the RMFU in 1907 until the present, demonstrating how members continually sought to control the means of production and marketing by forming cooperatives, providing consumer services, and engaging in politics. Powering this evolution was a group of “practical idealists”—the Farmers Union leaders and titular persistent progressives who shaped the organization’s growth and expansion. Initiated by Jim Patton, who brought the organization out of its oppositional roots and into its cooperative advocacy, the RMFU passed to John Stencel and then David Carter, joining hands with agricultural conservationists and small organic producers along the way to carry the torch for progressive agrarianism in today’s urbanized world. Shaken but undeterred by some notable failures, its leadership remains convinced of the efficacy of cooperatives as a means to achieve justice for all.

Discussing the broader social, economic, political, and environmental issues related to farming, ranching, and urbanization, Persistent Progressives seamlessly blends regional history with ongoing issues of agricultural and economic development.
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Physics Demonstrations
A Sourcebook for Teachers of Physics
Julien Clinton Sprott
University of Wisconsin Press, 2015
Wow! How? Few techniques are as effective at generating interest in science as dramatic demonstrations. This fully illustrated sourcebook describes eighty-five physics demonstrations suitable for performance both inside and outside classrooms. These demonstrations will fascinate and amaze while teaching the wonders and practical science of physics. Videos for the demonstrations are online at http://physicsdemonstrationsvideos.com/.
            Dr. Sprott shares demonstrations tested over many years in his popular public lectures on “The Wonders of Physics,” which appeal to general audiences and to students from grade school to graduate school. Science teachers at all levels will find a wealth of detail showing how to present these demonstrations to students with flair. Science professionals will find indispensable information for creating educational and entertaining public programs. Organized to teach the six major areas of classical physics—motion, heat, sound, electricity, magnetism, and light—Physics Demonstrations includes:
• a brief description of each demonstration
• materials lists, with sources for common materials
• preparation procedures
• discussions of the physics principles demonstrated
• potential safety hazards
• references for further information.
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Poindexter of Washington
A Study in Progressive Politics
Howard W Allen
Southern Illinois University Press, 1981

In this study of Miles Poindexter, Insurgent Republican turned conservative, Howard W. Allen reaches beyond the traditional bounds of biography to present a history of the United States Congress during the Progressive era and the early years after World War I.

A congressman (1909–13)and a senator (1913–23), Miles Poindexter of Washington State was an outspoken, progressive reformer before World War I. He struggled to protect “the people” from “special interests,” particularly defending the in­terest of his section against eastern “colonialism.” A man with a penchant for absolute positions, Poindexter became caught up in the emotionalism of the Insurgent Republican revolt. At one time or another he championed Socialists, the IWW, the strik­ing textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts—all unlikely causes for a middle-class lawyer from Spokane.

Regarding foreign policy, Poindexter was an uncompromis­ing nationalist who, with Theodore Roosevelt, declared himself a member of the Progressive party in 1912.

After 1917 Poindexter actively tried to suppress opponents of the war. Following the war his targets were “Bolshevists” and other radicals. He also developed intense hostility toward So­cialists, the IWW, and organized labor, fearing radicalism and labor. Reversing his former position, he allied himself with the eastern businessmen and regular Republicans in the Senate. Campaigning for the presidency in 1920, he appealed without success to the most conservative members of the party. He was defeated b a progressive Democrat in his 1922 bid for reelection to the Senate.

Allen examines the traditional sources—archival collections, newspaper files, and congressional reports. When he combines this material with a quantitative analysis of roll-call votes throughout Senator Poindexter’s years in Congress, he creates a remarkably useful method never before attempted in political biography.

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Politics, Labor, and the War on Big Business
The Path of Reform in Arizona, 1890-1920
David R. Berman
University Press of Colorado, 2012
Politics, Labor, and the War on Big Business details the rise, fall, and impact of the anticorporate reform effort in Arizona during the Progressive reform era, roughly 1890-1920. Drawing on previously unexamined archival files and building on research presented in his previous books, author David R. Berman offers a fresh look at Progressive heritage and the history of industrial relations during Arizona's formative period.

In the 1890s, once-heavily courted corporations had become, in the eyes of many, outside "money interests" or "beasts" that exploited the wealth of the sparsely settled area. Arizona's anticorporate reformers condemned the giant corporations for mistreating workers, farmers, ranchers, and small-business people and for corrupting the political system. During a thirty-year struggle, Arizona reformers called for changes to ward off corporate control of the political system, increase corporate taxation and regulation, and protect and promote the interests of working people.

Led by George W.P. Hunt and progressive Democrats, Arizona's brand of Progressivism was heavily influenced by organized labor, third parties, and Socialist activists. As highly powerful railroad and mining corporations retaliated, conflict took place on both political levels and industrial backgrounds, sometimes in violent form.

Politics, Labor and the War on Big Business places Arizona's experience in the larger historical discussion of reform activity of the period, considering issues involving the role of government in the economy and the possibility of reform, topics highly relevant to current debates.

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Politics the Wellstone Way
How to Elect Progressive Candidates and Win on Issues
Wellstone Action Wellstone Action Wellstone Action
University of Minnesota Press, 2005
During the past four years, political activism has grown to a level that has not been seen in the United States since the Vietnam War. Tensions over the war in Iraq and the presidential election motivated hundreds of thousands of people on both sides of the political fence to take to the streets. Politics the Wellstone Way offers a comprehensive set of strategies to help progressives channel that energy into winning issue-based and electoral campaigns.

Wellstone Action is a nonprofit organization dedicated to continuing Paul and Sheila Wellstone’s fight for progressive change and economic justice by teaching effective political action skills to people across the country. Politics the Wellstone Way is a workshop in book form, providing the detailed framework needed to jump-start a new generation of activists plus plenty of helpful tools for old pros, including articulating a strong message, base building, field organizing, budgeting, fundraising, scheduling, getting out the vote, and grassroots advocacy and lobbying, illustrated by practical and inspirational examples.

From the school board all the way to the White House, Politics the Wellstone Way instructs people on becoming better organizers, candidates, campaign workers, and citizen activists, empowering them to make their voices heard.

Wellstone Action was established by the Wellstones’ two surviving sons, David and Mark. The main vehicle for this ongoing work is Camp Wellstone, a weekend training program that Wellstone Action leads regularly in locations across the country. Jeff Blodgett, Paul Wellstone’s longtime campaign manager, is the executive director of Wellstone Action. For more information visit www.wellstoneaction.org.
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The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire
Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement
Barbara H. Fried
Harvard University Press, 1998

Law and economics is the leading intellectual movement in law today. This book examines the first great law and economics movement in the early part of the twentieth century through the work of one of its most original thinkers, Robert Hale. Beginning in the 1890s and continuing through the 1930s, progressive academics in law and economics mounted parallel assaults on free-market economic principles. They showed first that "private," unregulated economic relations were in fact determined by a state-imposed regime of property and contract rights. Second, they showed that the particular regime of rights that existed at that time was hard to square with any common-sense notions of social justice.

Today, Hale is best known among contemporary legal academics and philosophers for his groundbreaking writings on coercion and consent in market relations. The bulk of his writing, however, consisted of a critique of natural property rights. Taken together, these writings on coercion and property rights offer one of the most profound and elaborated critiques of libertarianism, far outshining the better-known efforts of Richard Ely and John R. Commons. In his writings on public utility regulation, Hale also made important contributions to a theory of just, market-based distribution.

This first, full-length study of Hale's work should be of interest to legal, economic, and intellectual historians.

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Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment
Leon Fink
Harvard University Press, 1997

How to lead the people and be one of them? What's a democratic intellectual to do? This longstanding dilemma for the progressive intellectual, how to bridge the world of educated opinion and that of the working masses, is the focus of Leon Fink's penetrating book, the first social history of the progressive thinker caught in the middle of American political culture.

In a series of vivid portraits, Fink investigates the means and methods of intellectual activists in the first part of the twentieth century--how they served, observed, and made their own history. In the stories of, among others, John R. Commons, Charles McCarthy, William English Walling, Anna Strunsky Walling, A. Philip Randolph, W. Jett Lauck, and Wil Lou Gray, he creates a panorama of reform of unusual power. Issues as broad as the cult of leadership and as specific as the Wisconsin school of labor history lead us into the heart of the dilemma of the progressive intellectual in our age.

The problem, as Fink describes it, is twofold: Could people prevail in a land of burgeoning capitalism and concentrated power? And should the people prevail? This book shows us Socialists and Progressives and, later, New Dealers grappling with these questions as they tried to redress the new inequities of their day--and as they confronted the immense frustrations of moving the masses. Fink's graphic depiction of intellectuals' labors in the face of capitalist democracy's challenges dramatizes a time in our past--and at the same time speaks eloquently to our own.

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Progressive New World
How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform
Marilyn Lake
Harvard University Press, 2019

The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism.

White settlers in the United States, who saw themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the state experiments of Australia and New Zealand that helped shape their commitment to an active state, women’s and workers’ rights, mothers’ pensions, and child welfare. Both settler societies defined themselves as New World, against Old World feudal and aristocratic societies and Indigenous peoples deemed backward and primitive.

In conversations, conferences, correspondence, and collaboration, transpacific networks were animated by a sense of racial kinship and investment in social justice. While “Asiatics” and “Blacks” would be excluded, segregated, or deported, Indians and Aborigines would be assimilated or absorbed. The political mobilizations of Indigenous progressives—in the Society of American Indians and the Australian Aborigines’ Progressive Association—testified to the power of Progressive thought but also to its repressive underpinnings. Burdened by the legacies of dispossession and displacement, Indigenous reformers sought recognition and redress in differently imagined new worlds and thus redefined the meaning of Progressivism itself.

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Regulating a New Society
Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933
Morton Keller
Harvard University Press, 1994

A leading scholar of twentieth-century American history looks again at the beginning of the century, this time giving us a remarkable portrait of the emergence of modern society and its distinctive transformations and social problems. As in Regulating a New Economy, his earlier book on the changing American economy, Morton Keller integrates political, legal, and governmental history, now providing the first comprehensive study of the ideas and interests that shaped early twentieth-century American social policy.

Keller looks at the major social institutions: the family, voluntary associations, religion, and education. He examines important social issues: the rights of the individual, the regulation of public mores (gambling, drugs, prostitution, alcohol abuse), the definition and punishment of crime, and social welfare policy (poverty, public health, conditions of labor). His final area of concern is one that assumed new importance after 1900: social policy directed at major groups, such as immigrants, blacks, Native Americans, and women.

The interpretive theme is fresh and controversial. Keller sees early twentieth-century American government not as an artifact of class, race, and gender conflict but as the playing out of tension between the Progressive thrust to restore social cohesion through the principle of order and organization and two other, mutually antipodal, social interests: the weight of the American past and the growing pluralism of modern America. The interplay among these elements—progressivism, persistence, pluralism—shaped early twentieth-century social policy. The result was no clear victory for any one of these public attitudes, but rather the emergence and delineation of most of the social issues that have dominated American public life for the rest of the century.

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Reinventing "The People"
The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism
Shelton Stromquist
University of Illinois Press, 2006

A comprehensive study of the Progressive movement, Reinventing "The People"contends that the persistence of class conflict in America challenged the very defining feature of Progressivism: its promise of social harmony through democratic renewal. 

Shelton Stromquist profiles the movement's work in diverse arenas of social reform, politics, labor regulation and so-called race improvement. While these reformers emphasized different programs, they crafted a common language of social reconciliation in which an imagined civic community--"the People"--would transcend parochial class and political loyalties. But efforts to invent a society without enduring class lines marginalized new immigrants and African Americans by declaring them unprepared for civic responsibilities. In so doing, Progressives laid the foundation for twentieth-century liberals' inability to see their world in class terms and to conceive of social remedies that might alter the structures of class power.

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The Revival of Labor Liberalism
Andrew Battista
University of Illinois Press, 2008

The Revival of Labor Liberalism is a careful analysis of the twentieth-century decline of the labor-liberal coalition and the important efforts to revive their political fortunes. Andrew Battista chronicles the efforts of several new political organizations that arose in the 1970s and 1980s with the goal of reuniting unions and liberals. Drawing from extensive documentary research and in-depth interviews with union leaders and political activists, Battista shows that the new organizations such as the Progressive Alliance, Citizen Labor Energy Coalition, and National Labor Committee made limited but real progress in reconstructing and strengthening the labor-liberal coalition. Although the labor-liberal alliance remained far weaker than the rival business-conservative alliance, Battista illuminates that it held a crucial role in labor and political history after 1968. Focuses on a fraught but evolving partnership, Battista provides a broad analysis of factional divisions among both unions and liberals and considers the future of unionism and the labor-liberal coalition in America.

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Roots of Reform
Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917
Elizabeth Sanders
University of Chicago Press, 1999
Roots of Reform offers a sweeping revision of our understanding of the rise of the regulatory state in the late nineteenth century. Sanders argues that politically mobilized farmers were the driving force behind most of the legislation that increased national control over private economic power. She demonstrates that farmers from the South, Midwest, and West reached out to the urban laborers who shared their class position and their principal antagonist—northeastern monopolistic industrial and financial capital—despite weak electoral support from organized labor.

Based on new evidence from legislative records and other sources, Sanders shows that this tenuous alliance of "producers versus plutocrats" shaped early regulatory legislation, remained powerful through the populist and progressive eras, and developed a characteristic method of democratic state expansion with continued relevance for subsequent reform movements.

Roots of Reform is essential reading for anyone interested in this crucial period of American political development.
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Sojourner Truth's America
Margaret Washington
University of Illinois Press, 2009
This fascinating biography tells the story of nineteenth-century America through the life of one of its most charismatic and influential characters: Sojourner Truth. In an in-depth account of this amazing activist, Margaret Washington unravels Sojourner Truth's world within the broader panorama of African American slavery and the nation's most significant reform era.
 
Born into bondage among the Hudson Valley Dutch in Ulster County, New York, Isabella was sold several times, married, and bore five children before fleeing in 1826 with her infant daughter one year before New York slavery was abolished. In 1829, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a domestic, preached, joined a religious commune, and then in 1843 had an epiphany. Changing her name to Sojourner Truth, she began traveling the country as a champion of the downtrodden and a spokeswoman for equality by promoting Christianity, abolitionism, and women's rights.
 
Gifted in verbal eloquence, wit, and biblical knowledge, Sojourner Truth possessed an earthy, imaginative, homespun personality that won her many friends and admirers and made her one of the most popular and quoted reformers of her times. Washington's biography of this remarkable figure considers many facets of Sojourner Truth's life to explain how she became one of the greatest activists in American history, including her African and Dutch religious heritage; her experiences of slavery within contexts of labor, domesticity, and patriarchy; and her profoundly personal sense of justice and intuitive integrity.
 
Organized chronologically into three distinct eras of Truth's life, Sojourner Truth's America examines the complex dynamics of her times, beginning with the transnational contours of her spirituality and early life as Isabella and her embroilments in legal controversy. Truth's awakening during nineteenth-century America's progressive surge then propelled her ascendancy as a rousing preacher and political orator despite her inability to read and write. Throughout the book, Washington explores Truth's passionate commitment to family and community, including her vision for a beloved community that extended beyond race, gender, and socioeconomic condition and embraced a common humanity. For Sojourner Truth, the significant model for such communalism was a primitive, prophetic Christianity.
 
Illustrated with dozens of images of Truth and her contemporaries, Sojourner Truth's America draws a delicate and compelling balance between Sojourner Truth's personal motivations and the influences of her historical context. Washington provides important insights into the turbulent cultural and political climate of the age while also separating the many myths from the facts concerning this legendary American figure.
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front cover of Southern Progressivism
Southern Progressivism
Dewey W. Grantham
University of Tennessee Press, 1983

front cover of Spearheads for Reform
Spearheads for Reform
The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914
Davis, Allen
Rutgers University Press, 1985
Allen Davis looks at the influence of settlement-house workers on the reform movement of the progressive era in Chicago, New York, and Boston. These workers were idealists in the way they approached the future, but they were also realists who knew how to organize and use the American political system to initiate change. They lobbied for a wide range of legislation and conducted statistical surveys that documented the need for reform. After World War I, settlement workers were replaced gradually by social workers who viewed their job as a profession, not a calling, and who did not always share the crusading zeal of their forerunners. Nevertheless, the settlement workers who were active from the 1880s to the 1920s left an important legacy: they steered public opinion and official attitudes toward the recognition that poverty was more likely caused by the social environment than by individual weakness,
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Transcending the New Woman
Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era
Charlotte J. Rich
University of Missouri Press, 2009
The dawn of the twentieth century saw the birth of the New Woman, a cultural and literary ideal that replaced Victorian expectations of domesticity with visions of social, political, and economic autonomy. Although such writers as Edith Wharton and Kate Chopin treated these ideals in well-known literature of that era, marginalized women also explored changing gender roles in works that deserve more attention today.
            This book is the first study to focus solely on multiethnic women writers’ responses to the ideal of the New Woman in America, opening up a world of literary texts that provide new insight into the phenomenon. Charlotte Rich reveals how these authors uniquely articulated the contradictions of the American New Woman, and how social class, race, or ethnicity impacted women’s experiences of both public and private life in the Progressive era.
            Rich focuses on the work of writers representing five distinct ethnicities: Native Americans S. Alice Callahan and Mourning Dove, African American Pauline Hopkins, Chinese American Sui Sin Far, Mexican American María Cristina Mena, and Jewish American Anzia Yezierska. She shows that some oftheir works contain both affirmative and critical portraits of white New Women; in other cases, while these authorsalign their multiethnic heroines with the new ideals, those ideals are sometimes subordinated to more urgent dialogues about inequality and racial violence.
            Here are views of women not usually encountered in fiction of this era. Callahan’s and Mourning Dove’s novels allude to women’s rights but ultimately privilege critiques of violence against Native Americans. Hopkins’s novels trace an increasingly pessimistic trajectory, drawing cynical conclusions about black women’s ability to thrive in a prejudiced society. Mena’s magazine portraits of Mexican life present complex critiques of this independent ideal of womanhood. Yezierska’s stories question the philanthropy of socially privileged Progressive female reformers with whom immigrant women interact. These writers’ works sometimes affirm emerging ideals but in other cases illuminate the iconic New Woman’s blindness to her own racial and economic privilege.
            Through her insightful analysis, Rich presents alternative versions of female autonomy, with characters living outside the mainstream or moving between cultures. Transcending the New Woman offers multiple ways of transcending an ideal that was problematic in its exclusivity, as well as an entrée to forgotten works. It shows how the concept of the New Woman can be seen in newly complex ways when viewed through the writings of authors whose lives often embody the New Woman’s emancipatory goals—and whose fictions both affirm and complicateher aspirations.

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front cover of The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism
The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism
Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–1925
James J. Connolly
Harvard University Press, 1998

Progressivism, James Connolly shows us, was a language and style of political action available to a wide range of individuals and groups. A diverse array of political and civic figures used it to present themselves as leaders of a communal response to the growing power of illicit interests and to the problems of urban-industrial life. As structural reforms weakened a ward-based party system that helped mute ethnic conflict, this new formula for political mobilization grew more powerful. Its most effective variation in Boston was an “ethnic progressivism” that depicted the city’s public life as a clash between its immigrant majority—“the people”—and a wealthy Brahmin elite—“the interests.” As this portrayal took hold, Bostonians came to view their city as a community permanently beset by ethnic strife.

In showing that the several reform visions that arose in Boston included not only the progressivism of the city’s business leaders but also a series of ethnic progressivisms, Connolly offers a new approach to urban public life in the early twentieth century. He rejects the assumption that ethnic politics was machine politics and employs both institutional and rhetorical analysis to reconstruct the inner workings of neighborhood public life and the social narratives that bound the city together. The result is a deeply textured picture that differs sharply from the traditional view of machine–reform conflict.

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front cover of The Tyranny of Change
The Tyranny of Change
America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920
Chambers, John Whiteclay II
Rutgers University Press, 2000

Between 1890 and 1920, the forces accompanying industrialization sent the familiar nineteenth-century world plummeting toward extinction. The traditional countryside with its villages and family farms was eclipsed by giant corporations and sprawling cities. America appeared headed into an unknown future.

In lively, accessible prose, John Chambers incorporates the latest scholarship about the social, cultural, political, and economic changes which produced modern America. He illuminates the experiences of blacks, Asians, Latinos, as well as other working men and women in the cities and countryside as they struggled to improve their lives in a transformed economy. He explores the dimensions of the new consumer society and the new information and entertainment industries: newspapers, magazines, the movies. Striding these pages are many of the prominent individuals who shaped the attitudes and institutions of modern America: J. P. Morgan and corporate reorganization; Jane Addams and the origin of modern social work; Mary Pickford and the new star-oriented motion picture industry; and the radical labor challenge of “Big Bill” Haywood and the “Wobblies.”

While recognizing a “progressive ethos”—a mixture of idealistic vision and pragmatic reforms—which dominated the mainstream reforms that characterized the period, Chambers elaborates the role of civic volunteerism as well as the state in achieving directed social change. He also emphasizes the importance of radical and conservative political forces in shaping the so-called “Progressive Era.”

The revised edition in this classic work has an updated bibliography and a new preface, both of which incorporate particularly the new social and cultural research of the past decade.

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front cover of Young Bob
Young Bob
A Biography of Robert M. La Follette, Jr.
Patrick J. Maney
Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2002

United States senator "Young Bob" La Follette entered politics as a young reformer in the shadow of his legendary father, "Fighting Bob" La Follette. He made his own mark as a key architect of Roosevelt’s New Deal and as a champion of labor rights and civil liberties. But in 1946 he was unexpectedly unseated by Joseph McCarthy, whose rise to Cold War notoriety foreshadowed La Follette’s despair and suicide in 1953. This new edition updates the only full scale biography of La Follette,Jr., the first to exploit his voluminous collection of personal papers. Patrick J. Maney makes clear that Young Bob’s story is as relevant today as it was when he died. His life stands as dramatic evidence of how one of the most respected politicians of his time bridged the political spectrum and was admired by both liberals like FDR and Harry Truman and conservatives like Robert Taft and Richard Nixon.

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