Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform by Marilyn Lake (review)

Marilyn Lake's important book Progressive New World reveals the forgotten transpacific linkages and relationships (mostly between America and Australia) that animated Progressive Era reform in the United States. Lake adopts the approach she and coauthor Henry Reynolds used to great effect in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008), which broke new ground on the study of whiteness by tracing the circulation of people, ideas, and technologies among white settler societies that gave rise to what W. E. B. Dubois famously called the global color line (or what Pankaj Mishra has recently dubbed the "religion of whiteness").¹ The settler colonialism framework reveals the dark side of American progressivism by highlighting the racial exclusion and indigenous dispossession that went into the project. "Such a perspective," Lake explains, "allows us to better understand progressivism's ambiguous character as simultaneously democratic and elitist, reformist and coercive, advanced and assimilationist, uplifting and repressive" (4–5). In taking this approach, Progressive New World expands the geography of progressive reform beyond Europe and the "Atlantic crossings" traced by Daniel Rodgers (though she doesn't exactly frame it this way) and, in doing so, shows that a transnational progressivism didn't merely grow out of a shared sense of dilemma brought on by industrial capitalism.²

In Lake's story, reformers like Theodore Roosevelt, Carrie Chapman Catt, Florence Kelley, and Oliver Wendell Holmes looked across the Pacific into the anglophone settler world for inspiration and workable social models. They admired and sought to emulate the Australasia example that had yielded progressive achievements like the secret ballot, women's suffrage, legal minimum wage, industrial arbitration, children's courts, and old-age pensions. Indeed, Roosevelt's 1912 presidential candidacy was condemned for being a "mere rehash of policies long in vogue in Australia and New Zealand" (7). Reformers in the United States did not imbibe these ideas or policies wholesale: they recognized that differences in political systems and cultures required adaptation or made some of them unsuitable for the American context. In some cases, they were more interested in the "voluntarist" elements of anglophone settler reform, as opposed to statist regulations of a "socialistic" system. The peripatetic labor reformer Victor Selden Clark, a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, found Australia's and New Zealand's compulsory minimum wage, maximum work hours, and industrial arbitration "too radical" to be applied to America, which drew loud protests from his friend/interlocutor Edward Tregear, who also happened to be New Zealand's secretary of labor.

Lake emphasizes the shared experience of settler colonialism in fostering "a sense of kinship across the Pacific"—a "racial kinship" generated from "their sensibilities as "pioneers" of "new lands," as "path-breakers" and builders of "new communities" (17). For Lake's progressives, a shared passion for creating democracy and social equality for a "white man's country" linked them in solidarity, a comity of settler whiteness. "Reformers in settler societies began to cast themselves as 'progressive' in a temporal construction of 'double difference'—distinguishing themselves both from Old World feudalism and from Stone Age savagery" (12–13). As a racialized project, reform efforts for greater social protection and equality simultaneously gave rise to racial exclusion and discrimination. For example, the logic for state aid for poor mothers was used to justify the abduction of indigenous babies and children. Minimum wage law, established to provide a living wage for workers, excluded Chinese "coolies." The secret ballot, intended to root out political corruption and ease the passage of women's suffrage, disenfranchised African American and immigrant voters. As Lake argues, progressive achievements for white settlers were accompanied by greater inequality and exclusion for nonwhite people. And this was a feature, not a bug, of transpacific progressivism. In identifying these trends, Lake makes an important exhortation, which American historians would do well to heed: "It is time to consider how the study...