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. 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.
Although many observers have assumed that pluralism prevailed in American political life from the start, inherited ideals of civic virtue and moral unity proved stubbornly persistent and influential. The tension between these conceptions of public life was especially evident in the young nation's burgeoning cities. Exploiting a wide range of sources, including novels, cartoons, memoirs, and journalistic accounts, James J. Connolly traces efforts to reconcile democracy and diversity in the industrializing cities of the United States from the antebellum period through the Progressive Era. The necessity of redesigning civic institutions and practices to suit city life triggered enduring disagreements centered on what came to be called machine politics. Featuring plebian leadership, a sharp masculinity, party discipline, and frank acknowledgment of social differences, this new political formula first arose in eastern cities during the mid-nineteenth century and became a subject of national discussion after the Civil War. During the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, business leaders, workers, and women proposed alternative understandings of how urban democracy might work. Some tried to create venues for deliberation that built common ground among citizens of all classes, faiths, ethnicities, and political persuasions. But accommodating such differences proved difficult, and a vision of politics as the businesslike management of a contentious modern society took precedence. As Connolly makes clear, machine politics offered at best a quasi-democratic way to organize urban public life. Where unity proved elusive, machine politics provided a viable, if imperfect, alternative.
A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power. The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches In today’s era, often referred to as a “second Gilded Age,” this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections
In this groundbreaking study, Kent Redding examines the fluid political landscape of the nineteenth-century South, revealing the complex interplay between the elite’s manipulation of political and racial identity and the innovative mobilizing strategies marginalized groups adopted in order to combat disfranchisement. Far from being a low-level, localized trend, the struggle for power in North Carolina would be felt across the entire country as race-and class-based organizing challenged the dominant models of making and holding power. Redding reveals how the ruling class operates with motivations and methods very similar to those of the black voters and Populist farmers they fought against. He tracks how the elites co-opted the innovative mobilizing strategies of the subaltern groups to effectively use their own weapons against them. At the core of Making Race, Making Power is an insightful dissection of the concrete connections between political strategies of solidarity and exclusion and underlying patterns of race relations.
In the 1930s, Aaron Copland began to write in an accessible style he described as "imposed simplicity." Works like El Salón México, Billy the Kid, Lincoln Portrait, and Appalachian Spring feature a tuneful idiom that brought the composer unprecedented popular success and came to define an American sound. Yet the cultural substance of that sound--the social and political perspective that might be heard within these familiar pieces--has until now been largely overlooked. While it has long been acknowledged that Copland subscribed to leftwing ideals, Music for the Common Man is the first sustained attempt to understand some of Copland's best-known music in the context of leftwing social, political, and cultural currents of the Great Depression and Second World War. Musicologist Elizabeth Crist argues that Copland's politics never merely accorded with mainstream New Deal liberalism, wartime patriotism, and Communist Party aesthetic policy, but advanced a progressive vision of American society and culture. Copland's music can be heard to accord with the political tenets of progressivism in the 1930s and '40s, including a fundamental sensitivity toward those less fortunate, support of multiethnic pluralism, belief in social democracy, and faith that America's past could be put in service of a better future. Crist explores how his works wrestle with the political complexities and cultural contradictions of the era by investing symbols of America--the West, folk song, patriotism, or the people--with progressive social ideals. Much as been written on the relationship between politics and art in the 1930s and '40s, but very little on concert music of the era. Music for the Common Man offers fresh insights on familiar pieces and the political context in which they emerged.
This acclaimed work surveys the varied course of religious life in modern America. Beginning with the close of the Victorian Age, it moves through the shifting power of Protestantism and American Catholicism and into the intense period of immigration and pluralism that has characterized our nation's religious experience.
In late nineteenth-century Boston, battles over black party loyalty were fights over the place of African Americans in the post–Civil War nation. In his fresh in-depth study of black partisanship and politics, Millington W. Bergeson-Lockwood demonstrates that party politics became the terrain upon which black Bostonians tested the promise of equality in America's democracy. Most African Americans remained loyal Republicans, but Race Over Party highlights the actions and aspirations of a cadre of those who argued that the GOP took black votes for granted and offered little meaningful reward for black support. These activists branded themselves "independents," forging new alliances and advocating support of whichever candidate would support black freedom regardless of party. By the end of the century, however, it became clear that partisan politics offered little hope for the protection of black rights and lives in the face of white supremacy and racial violence. Even so, Bergeson-Lockwood shows how black Bostonians' faith in self-reliance, political autonomy, and dedicated organizing inspired future generations of activists who would carry these legacies into the foundation of the twentieth-century civil rights movement.
The Revolution of ’28 explores the career of New York governor and 1928 Democratic presidential nominee Alfred E. Smith. Robert Chiles peers into Smith’s work and uncovers a distinctive strain of American progressivism that resonated among urban, ethnic, working-class Americans in the early twentieth century. The book charts the rise of that idiomatic progressivism during Smith’s early years as a state legislator through his time as governor of the Empire State in the 1920s, before proceeding to a revisionist narrative of the 1928 presidential campaign, exploring the ways in which Smith’s gubernatorial progressivism was presented to a national audience. As Chiles points out, new-stock voters responded enthusiastically to Smith's candidacy on both economic and cultural levels. Chiles offers a historical argument that describes the impact of this coalition on the new liberal formation that was to come with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, demonstrating the broad practical consequences of Smith’s political career. In particular, Chiles notes how Smith’s progressive agenda became Democratic partisan dogma and a rallying point for policy formation and electoral success at the state and national levels. Chiles sets the record straight in The Revolution of ’28 by paying close attention to how Smith identified and activated his emergent coalition and put it to use in his campaign of 1928, before quickly losing control over it after his failed presidential bid.
Once seen as threats to mainstream society, Irish Americans have become an integral part of the American story. More than 40 million Americans claim Irish descent, and the culture and traditions of Ireland and Irish Americans have left an indelible mark on U.S. society. Timothy J. Meagher fuses an overview of Irish American history with an analysis of historians' debates, an annotated bibliography, a chronology of critical events, and a glossary discussing crucial individuals, organizations, and dates. He addresses a range of key issues in Irish American history from the first Irish settlements in the seventeenth century through the famine years in the nineteenth century to the volatility of 1960s America and beyond. The result is a definitive guide to understanding the complexities and paradoxes that have defined the Irish American experience. Throughout the work, Meagher invokes comparisons to Irish experiences in Canada, Britain, and Australia to challenge common perceptions of Irish American history. He examines the shifting patterns of Irish migration, discusses the role of the Catholic church in the Irish immigrant experience, and considers the Irish American influence in U.S. politics and modern urban popular culture. Meagher pays special attention to Irish American families and the roles of men and women, the emergence of the Irish as a "governing class" in American politics, the paradox of their combination of fervent American patriotism and passionate Irish nationalism, and their complex and sometimes tragic relations with African and Asian Americans.
In Pursuing Johns, Thomas C. Mackey studies the New York Committee of Fourteen and its members' attempts to influence vagrancy laws in early-20th-century New York City as a way to criminalize men's patronizing of female prostitutes. It sought out and prosecuted the city's immoral hotels, unlicensed bars, opium dens, disorderly houses, and prostitutes. It did so because of the threats to individual "character" such places presented. In the early 1920s, led by Frederick Whitin, the Committee thought that the time had arrived to prosecute the men who patronized prostitutes through what modern parlance calls a "john's law." After a notorious test case failed to convict a philandering millionaire for vagrancy, the only statutory crime available to punish men who patronized prostitutes, the Committee lobbied for a change in the state's criminal law. In the process, this representative of traditional 19th-century purity reform allied with the National Women's Party, the advanced feminists of the 1920s. Their proposed "Customer Amendment" united the moral Right and the feminist Left in an effort to alter and use the state's criminal law to make men moral, defend their character, and improve New York City's overall morality. Mackey's contribution to the literature is unique. Instead of looking at how vice commissions targeted female prostitutes or the commerce supporting and surrounding them, Mackey concentrates on how men were scrutinized. Book jacket.
