A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920

by Michael E. McGerr

Book Overview

With America's current and ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor and the constant threat of the disappearance of the middle class, the Progressive Era stands out as a time when the middle class had enough influence on the country to start its own revolution. Before the Progressive Era most Americans lived on farms, working from before sunrise to after sundown every day except Sunday with tools that had changed very little for centuries...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195183657
• ISBN13: 9780195183658
• Release Date: July 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.33 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Well rounded

In McGerr's view, progressivism was a broad based Victorian middle class movement dedicated to extending its way of life - sober, abstemious, moderate, associative, protective, hard-working, modern, consumerist if guiltily so - both upward to a profligate and individualist capitalist elite and downward to an unruly and dissipated working class. Its work was only partially successful - antitrust, regulation, healthcare, communal associations - and ultimately done in by its own contradictions. Progressives, moderates by temperate and nature, could not embrace the extremism inherent in its boldest initiatives. This became apparent in the bold initiatives undertaken by the Wilson administration for World War I, greatly extending government reach in private and commercial affairs. This is a rich and nuanced interpretation of the era. Jaklak sez check it out.

Good Overview of the Progressive Movement

McGerr's book is a valuable resource on helping to define who the progressives were and what they wanted to accomplish. The Progressives were at their peak in influence from the late 19th Century until the end of World War I, from Theodore Roosevelt's administration to Woodrow Wilson's administration. As McGerr stated, Progressives wanted to transform Americans into their own image of a middle class society, uplifting the poorest workers while chastising the wealthiest. It is this transformative vision that makes the Progressive movement stand out from most other political movements in our country's history. In addition to transforming Americans, McGerr says Progressives wanted to end class conflict, use government to control big businesses, and use segregation to help implement their objectives successfully. McGerr is effective in adding the human dimension to his history of Progressivism. The Garlands, young Rahel Golub and her immigrant family, the Bradley-Martins and others are all used to give an image of who some of the wage laborers, upper class and progressive reformers were. The reformers include many of the standard names like Hull-House founder Jane Addams, salon smashing Carrie Nation, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and a host of other reformers in all different strata of society. Many organizations that formed to support the various agendas of the Progressive movement are also mentioned, including the Anti-Saloon League, the Country Life Commission, and others that represented various Progressive causes. I felt the author was most focused on and interested in the Progressive belief in transforming other people to conform to this middle class vision of society and he handles the issue very ably. Whether it be their dislike of rugged individualism or their crusades against personal vices like divorce and alcohol or their belief in the promises of education, the Progressives truly believed people could be changed and molded into their way of thinking. While a bold and radical idea, it is also naive and arrogant. As time revealed, people grew tired and resistant to the Progressive idea of changing people's attitudes and way of living. Times had changed with technological innovations like the automobile and new recreational and leisure activities that allowed for a new sense of personal freedom. The effects of World War I and the new challenges in a post-war society also added to the decline of Progressive ideals. Surprisingly, I didn't think the author gave a lot of attention to more of the legislative accomplishments of the Progressive Era, especially during the Wilson Administration, but overall as well. He mentioned many topics that led to enacted legislation, but generally with little detail. McGerr is quite good in showing the larger picture and how people reacted to the movement and how external factors effected its progression and or decline. The social aspects of the Progressive movement are his clear

Ambiguities of reform

This well-done account of the rise of the Progressive Movement is as good on the history of the period, and is studded with many interesting details about the Victorian period in the gestation of the great challenge to the world of big business. Notable, and what makes the book out of the ordinary, is depiction of the limits of the movement seen in the account of the movement's attitudes toward segregation. This was also the era of consolidated Jim Crow, where were the Reformer? The book is food for thought indeed given the strange similarity to our own era of politics, or lack of it.

Building a Middle-Class Paradise

In A FIERCE DISCONTENT, Michael McGerr, has written compact history of progressivism -- the wide, complex river of reform that began to overrun the constrictive banks of Victorianism in the 1870s, gathered force and power with the tacit and sometimes outright approval of the administrations of Teddy Roosevelt, Taft and Wilson, and then vanished into the great cataract of the Red Scare in the immediate aftermath of WWI. Through a narrative of the social and economic cross-currents which progressives attempted either to control or unleash, a narrative interwoven with a terse biographies of reformers as well as those whom they hoped bring into confluence with their vision of the "middle-class paradise" (in William James' scornful elitist characterization), McGerr tells a story of epic sweep. "To change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; to segregate society" were, according to McGerr, the four quintessential battles of the progressive movement. With this formulation he thus includes Carrie Nation as a progressive, making a strong argument that in her attacks on drinking and barrooms she was attempting to change the behavior of men, and in so doing, improve the lives of women, and change society for the better. He also includes Frank Lloyd Wright, who in his "destruction of the box" and the creation of the prairie style attempted to refashion the very spaces that people lived in. Along the way, we fall in with Jane Addams, Roosevelt, the Wobblies, Bill Haywood, Eugene Debs, and less well-known people such as Rahel Golub, a young girl from New York's Lower East Side who develops the "double vision" of the immigrant daughter -- one eye seeing the middle-class America as embodied by the settlement workers, and the other eye seeing the inside of her tenement, her workbench and her suddenly constrained life.By concentrating on the extra-political activities of the progressives, such as the anti-divorce and Chatauqua movements, McGerr shifts the emphasis away from usual story of the Progressives later political interventions. What comes across most clearly in this history therefore is the evangelical zeal with which the reforming middle-class attempted to change not just the economic and social arrangements of America and the American state, but the American people. They sought to spread their "Social Gospel" among both the lordly "upper ten" at the top and the working classes who slaved at the bottom in the sweatshops. Believing that if these undisciplined classes at the extremes of the spectrum could be made to see the error of their ideological assumptions and adopt the progressive ideal of "association," (as opposed to the creed of individualism among the "upper ten" and the mutualism of the working classes), then these groups would come to see the wisdom of the progressive approach. Progressives attempted to bridge the social distance between the rich and poor through the mediating ideology of association. An ideology p