Armchair Warriors

Michael McGerr.A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920. New York: Free Press, 2003. 395 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00.

Michael McGerr does not like contemporary American politics and he does not believe that you do either. "We live in a politically disappointing time," he writes at the outset of his book on the progressive era, "[n]o matter what our politics." The "crusading middle class" reformers of the progressive era therefore fascinate us even as they must take the blame for our ennui: they let us down by their "unrealistic expectations" and their "promise of utopianism," and they taught our predecessors a skepticism that persists in us. We have nothing like their "fierce discontent," McGerr contends (pp. xiii-xvi). He has not been watching Fox News, whose airwaves vibrate with ferocity and discontent at the status quo (which to foster ferocity is presented as dominated by a liberal elite), expressed on behalf of a crusading, virtuous middle class that seeks to remake America in its own image. Perhaps Fox's partisans do not qualify as "progressives"—but then, it is traditionally hard to tell who does.

In McGerr's analysis, the progressives of a hundred years ago have a great deal in common with the conservative culture warriors of our own time. Oppressed by the prevailing tendency of history, alarmed by immigration and racial mixing, both groups took to the mass media to make their cases; both sought to re-make other Americans whether they wanted re-making or not. Possibly the only difference lies in their respective attitudes toward the very rich, whom the progressives of history sought to restrain and the fiercely discontented reformers of our present moment hope to emulate. Even so, the similarity between the two middle-class sensibilities suggests the awkwardness of altogether identifying McGerr's reformers with his titular "progressive movement."

For in keeping with the traditions of progressive-era historiography, the subjects of McGerr's book are definitely McGerr's progressives and nobody else's. That is to say, they are not James T. Kloppenberg's progressives (pragmatic philosophers), Daniel T. Rodgers's progressives (cosmopolitan activists), or Elizabeth Sanders's progressives (agrarian Congressmen)—to name a few of the usual suspects.¹ McGerr's progressives comprise an urban middle class allied with and often led by richer Americans (like Theodore Roosevelt) who invoke bourgeois virtues. They have a great deal in common with the "liberal reformers" of McGerr's first book, of whom he wrote, "Unable to keep the poor and uneducated out of politics, they tried to reshape the political world in which these voters lived. . . . This was a politics with the educated man once more at the center, his principles the yardstick of public life."² Speaking for a prim sensibility appalled—probably because tempted—by the frolics of rich and poor alike, McGerr's progressives shame, punish, and lecture others about their own exemplary conduct: they sound like suburban parents recorded at the worst possible moment and forever held to their hypocrisies.

As a consequence, McGerr's progressivism has little indeed to do with political philosophy or even plain politics, but derives instead from personal experience and the ordinary crises of middle-class life in the age of industry. The result is a homely rendition of even the most bloodlessly arithmetical legislation. Consider how McGerr discusses a basic element of progressivism, so basic that it routinely and uncontroversially carries the label "progressive": the income tax.

In conventional accounts of tax policy, the ancient idea of an impost on incomes provides the essential moral basis for modern political economy. Traditional analyses follow Adam Smith, who considered it the first "maxim" of taxation that

[t]he subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state. . . . In the observation or neglect...