Progressive Patriotism

Jonathan M. Hansen. The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xi + 255 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $51.00 (cloth); $19.00 (paper).

Andrew M. Rieser. The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, 1874–1920. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 399 pp. Figures, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $37.50.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of intellectual history's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Over a quarter century since the Wingspread Conference, which gathered together the day's remaining intellectual historians to strategize the field's recovery from social history's sudden rise to professional hegemony, intellectual history has a new journal (Modern Intellectual History), a new generation of practitioners, and at least a few positions in American colleges and universities. Intellectual history has certainly changed over the decades of its recovery from charges of elitism and grandiosity; the contributors to the Wingspread Conference called for tighter methodologies, more specific and limited claims, and attention to the construction and context of discourse as well as its content, recommendations that have decisively shaped the field in the decades since.¹

Curiously absent from the discussions at Wingspread, however, were the keywords of social history: race, class, and gender (today we can add ethnicity and sexuality to the list). For all their receptivity to the methods of anthropology and at least some of the implications of continental theory, those intellectual historians who did not depart for the more narrowly defined fields of gender and race history remained committed to a history of ideas valued more for their content or the work they did in their contexts than for the subject positions of the intellectuals who developed and articulated them. This meant that the problem of how intellectual historians could study large movements like pragmatism or big concepts like republicanism without reifying the privilege enjoyed by pragmatists and political theorists in their historical moments remained unresolved. But with the appearance of the two works under review, Jonathan M. Hansen's Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 1890–1920 and Andrew C. Rieser's The Chautauqua Moment: Protestants, Progressives, and the Culture of Modern Liberalism, the new generation of intellectual historians seems to promise an integration of the analytical categories of social history into the study of ideas.

Both books are blurbed by the senior intellectual historian chosen by the Journal of American History to represent the field in its June 2003 "Interchange" on the state of the profession, David Hollinger, and both authors recently completed their doctorates under prominent scholars in intellectual and cultural history. And although their approaches and accomplishments are in many ways very different, both Hansen and Rieser take the problem of difference seriously enough to weave the categories of race, class, and gender into their most basic methodology.

Hansen employs what might best be called a "quota approach" to his study of civic consciousness between 1890 and 1920. In order to reconstruct the model of liberal citizenship that linked patriotism to engaged criticism and social democracy, Hansen chooses for his intellectuals one African-American (W.E.B. Du Bois), one woman (Jane Addams), one Jew (Horace Kallen), a socialist to represent the working class (Eugene V. Debs), and several of the usual suspects in intellectual history—William James, John Dewey, and Randolph Bourne. Not a community of discourse in either the commonsensical meaning or the sense developed by Hollinger in his Wingspread essay, these "cosmopolitan patriots" seem to have been selected as much for the demographic reach provided by their subject positions as for the ideas about engaged citizenship and national affiliation that Hansen so ably demonstrates they shared despite their differences. Indeed, Hansen describes Debs, Du Bois, and Addams as growing up "on the margins of Victorian Era America": Debs advantaged by his white maleness but somewhat unmanned as a "second-generation . . . immigrant"; Addams stuck in the "precarious position of an un-enfranchised woman"; Du Bois suffering from a "hyperconsciousness of his outsider...