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    A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
    A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
    A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
    Audiobook13 hours

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

    Written by Michael McGerr

    Narrated by Joe Barrett

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs, yet the progressive movement collapsed as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare.



    Michael McGerr argues the expectations raised by the progressives' utopian hopes have nagged at us ever since. Our current, less-than-epic politics must inevitably disappoint a nation that once thought in epic terms. The New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and now the war on terrorism have each entailed ambitious plans for America. But the failure of the progressive movement set boundaries around the aspirations of all of these efforts. None of them was as ambitious, as openly determined to transform people and create utopia, as the progressive movement. We have been forced to think modestly ever since that age of bold reform. For all of us, right, center, and left, the age of "fierce discontent" is long over.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMar 13, 2018
    ISBN9781977372901
    A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920

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    Reviews for A Fierce Discontent

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      Enjoyed this readable account of America's first (of many) flirtations with Progressivism, which explores everything from politics to economics, society, and culture. McGerr never strays far from his central thesis - that the Progressive movement represented a shift from individualism ("Anything can be achieved through hard work") to collectivism ("We have a responsibility to our fellow man, especially the ones that have no power"), from Victorianism (traditional domesticity) to modernism (self-actualization), with a heavy emphasis on solidifying the power, prosperity, and moral compass of the middle class. This hypothesis provides a useful lens for contextualizing the many subtopics that this book addresses, which include:

      * The Rise of Progressivism (the social and cultural forces that triggered dissatisfaction)
      * Transforming Americans (the Progressives' attempts to regulate behaviour and curtail exploitation)
      * Ending class conflict (their attempts to empower workers through collective organization)
      * Controlling big business (their efforts to reign in the unethical practices of monopolies)
      * Segregation (the extent of their many failures, and the reasons for them)
      * Technology & entertainment (how the rise of individual pleasures undermined the Progressive agenda)
      * How WW1 brough Progressivism to an end (at least temporarily, as the US has continually lurched between Progressivism and Conservatism ever since)

      Each chapter begins by focusing on the story of an individual, before expanding to explore the wider issues and then eventually circling back to reflect on the implications on the individual whose story began the discussion, a technique that adds a level of personalization that these kinds of historical analyses often lack.

      There's a staggering amount of research here, but the author does a good job of keeping things moving and resists the urge to get too far down in the weeds. McGerr lacks the storytelling chops of a Doris Kearns Goodwin or David McCullough, but I still ended up reading this whole thing in just three long sessions because the subject matter is so fascinating ... and so timely. Looking for insights into potential outcomes of our recent jarring cycle of progressivism --> conservativism? unregulated capitalism vs. social justice? nativism vs. assimilation? The impact of technological innovation on culture? Looking back to what happened in the past is always a great place to start.
    • 5/5
      In A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, Michael McGerr argues “that progressivism created much of our contemporary political predicament. The epic of reform at the dawn of the twentieth century helps explain the less-than-epic politics at the dawn of the twenty-first. Progressivism, the creed of a crusading middle class, offered the promise of utopianism – and generated the inevitable letdown of unrealistic expectations” (pg. xiv). He shifts the historiography to look “at four quintessential progressive battles: to change other people; to end class conflict; to control big business; and to segregate society” (pg. xv). While McGerr focuses on the usual historical actors, he also draws upon the experiences of Jane Addams and her parents, Russian immigrants Golub and Rahel, and the Garland family.
      McGerr ties the beginning of the Progressive Era to the Victorian middle class’ discontent with the upper class’ lavish lifestyle. He writes, “By the turn of the century, middle-class men and women, radicalized and resolute, were ready to sweep aside the upper ten and build a new, progressive America” (pg. 39). Alongside this conflict, “across Victorian America, women demanded new opportunities outside the home” (pg. 51). While the era witnessed many disparate conflicts, “the progressives, driven by their project to transform relations between men and women, end class conflict, and make the nation more middle-class, were almost always in the thick of the fighting” (pg. 79). McGerr demonstrates that progressives’ utopian idealism did not extend to race relations. He writes, “There were limits to the progressives’ optimistic faith in transforming other people. Segregation revealed both a sense of realism and an underlying pessimism in the middle class. Even as they labored urgently to end the differences between classes, the progressives felt some social differences would not be erased for many years. And some differences, they believed, could not be erased at all” (pg. 183). This led to an acceptance of Southern Jim Crow segregation and Northern segregation. McGerr traces the decline of progressivism to new entertainments and pleasure-seeking activities in the early 1900s (pg. 260) coupled with the Red Scare (pg. 306) and the “reemergence of political conservatism after years of defeat and demoralization” in the 1920 election (pg. 310). In his conclusion, McGerr argues that the failure of progressivism limited policies that appeared to take similar approaches, such as the New Deal or the Great Society.
      A Fierce Discontent draws upon social, political, and economic history and resembles Eric Foner’s Reconstruction in that it primarily synthesizes much of the previous research on the subject while offering a new perspective through his use of vignettes, like that of Rahel Golub, that differ from the usual top-down approach to the Progressive Era.