Still in Search of Progressivism?

Recognizing that he faced a difficult task, Steven J. Diner opens his survey of the Progressive Era by asking an honest and potentially self-defeating rhetorical question: “Do we really need another book on the Progressive Era?” (p. vii). This question is justified, given the fact that John Whiteclay Chambers II, John Milton Cooper, Alan Dawley, and Nell Irvin Painter have recently produced overviews of the period (not to mention Leon Fink fine edited collection of primary and secondary sources in Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, which range from solid to excellent. But Diner is also correct to answer his question in the affirmative, for we are still, to paraphrase Daniel Rodgers’ 1982 state-of-the-historiography essay, “searching for progressivism.” ¹

Though he does not put forth a radically new view of the period and his main argument that the Progressive Era was a time of rapid and anxiety-producing change can hardly be called novel, Diner offers an original take on the search for progressivism. Diner’s book contains superb summaries of much of the recent literature of the period and includes a first-rate bibliographic essay. Its main value lies in its catholicity and in its decentering, not elimination, of some of the more familiar ways of understanding the Progressive Era. In his juxtaposition of material that is usually treated separately, Diner subtly encourages the reader to rethink the significance of the period. After reading his book, students will see that the Progressive Era was indeed a time of experts, professionals, and such great political leaders as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. They will see the far-reaching impact of the new corporate economy, singled out by Diner as the most important transformation in an era characterized by monumental change of all kinds. And they will also learn that ordinary Americans experienced and contributed to the Progressive Era. Indeed Diner recounting of the various personal strategies by which Americans dealt with economic, political, and social change lies at the heart of the book. As Diner notes, ordinary citizens “did not feel nearly so powerless as reformers portrayed them, or so deprived of an imagined individualism and autonomy now lost” (p. 202).

Any survey of the years 1890–1920 must come to terms with the nature of the Progressive Era and the nature of the survey text. Both of these are complicated by the twin difficulties of analyzing and summarizing large amounts of information and the specific historiographical minefields of this time period. All survey text writers face a dilemma: should syntheses be summary-driven or thesis-driven? Books aiming to synthesize monographs, dissertations, and journal articles, especially in such a vibrant field as turn-of-the-century America, fall into two general categories. Some use the existing secondary literature to propose a bold, new interpretation of the subject. Their concern is less with comprehensiveness than with providing a thesis, which serves as a glue that links the disparate works. The advantage of this approach is that a strong thesis makes the summaries of disparate works cohere and provides the reader with a framework to think about books and articles that are not mentioned or have not yet been published. A classic example of this approach is Robert Wiebe’s The Search for Order (1967), which was far more significant for its thesis—it made “island communities,” “new middle class,” and the “organizational revolution” part of the historian’s lexicon—than for its adept summaries of the literature. More recently, Dawley’s Struggles for Justice, while containing a thorough literature review, forcefully argued that understanding the changing nature of, and debates within, liberalism is the key to understanding the Progressive period. Syntheses that contain bold arguments the kind that set off debate, reconceptualize the period, and place individual monographs in a new context, will stand the test of time. More commonly, syntheses aim for comprehensiveness, summarizing and organizing the most important recent works on...