The National Civic Federation and the Making of a New Liberalism, 1900-1915
The National Civic Federation and the Making of a New Liberalism, 1900-1915

Author: Christopher J. Cyphers

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2002-01-30

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0313010765

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Founded in 1900, the National Civic Federation (NCF), a broad-based, nongovernmental social and policy reform organization, emerged throughout the Progressive Era as one of the nation's most powerful policy research and lobbying groups. Amidst the strong demand by rank-and-file Americans for economic and social reform, the NCF proposed that the government begin to assume a more prominent role in managing the nation's economy and providing for the needs of the country's weakest and most vulnerable citizens. The organization constructed broad-based coalitions of business leaders, labor leaders, social scientists, and politicians with diverse backgrounds to fashion model legislation and promote public policy aimed at meeting the demands created by modern capitalism. Cyphers' work challenges the longstanding assumption that organizations like the NCF existed simply to build a relationship between big business and the government for the sole benefit of big business. He argues that the NCF sought the preservation of the fundamental tenets of American liberalism and the redefinition of this liberalism for a modern polity whose life was shaped by industrial and commercial capitalism. It saw the individual states, rather than the federal government, as the ideal mechanism to promote uniform economic and social reform. Cyphers also charts the origins of civic cooperation and the creation of voluntary associations as alternatives to the statist remedies to modern economic and social problems that were championed by America's early 20th-century socialist movement.

Annual Report
Annual Report

Author: American Bar Association

Publisher:

Published: 1909

Total Pages: 1196

ISBN-13:

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Covers 1st-95th (29th-30th each in 2 v.) annual meetings held 1878-1972.

Letters of Louis D. Brandeis: Volume III, 1913-1915
Letters of Louis D. Brandeis: Volume III, 1913-1915

Author: Louis D. Brandeis

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1973-06-30

Total Pages: 678

ISBN-13: 0873952316

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With the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1912, Louis D. Brandeis emerged as the undisputed intellectual leader of those reformers who were trying to recreate a democratic society free from the economic and political depradations of monopolistic enterprise. But now these reformers had a champion in the White House, and direct access to him through one of his most trusted advisers. In this volume we see what was probably the high point of progressive reform--the first three years of the Wilson Administration. During these years Brandeis was considered for a Cabinet position, consulted frequently on matters of patronage, and called in at key junctures to determine policy. But he still kept up his many obligations to different reform groups: arguing cases before the Supreme Court, acting as public counsel in rate hearings, writing Other People's Money, one of the key exposes of the era, as well as advising his good friend Robert M. LaFollette and other reform leaders. Yet at the height of his career as a reformer, Brandeis suddenly took on another heavy obligation, the leadership of the American Zionist movement, and helped marshal Jews in this country to aid their brethren in war-ravaged Europe and Palestine. Carrying over his democratic ideals, he challenged the established American Jewish aristocracy in the Congress movement, in order to broaden the base of Jewish participation in important issues. At the end of 1915, Brandeis was an important figure not only in domestic reform and Jewish affairs, but on the international scene as well. And although no one knew it at the time, he stood at the brink of nomination to the nation's highest court. As in the earlier volumes, these letters indicate the inner workings of American reform, and they also show how American Zionism, under the leadership of Brandeis and his lieutenants, assumed those characteristics that would make it a unique and powerful instrument in world politics.