^* I dedicate this essay to my chief comrade in re-democratizing the Progressive Era, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore. I would like to acknowledge Richard L. McCormick and James Livingston for being such excellent, and tolerant, tutors in my first attempts to grasp Progressivism, as well as Maureen Flanagan for providing the opportunity to compose this essay as well as for her excellent editing. Thanks too to James Connolly, Joel Fishman, Brett Flehinger, Sarah Henry, Jonathan Holloway, Benjamin Johnson, Kevin Mattson, Michael Mullins, Daniel Rodgers, Adriane Smith, and Nancy Unger for their advice, criticism, and encouragement.

¹ Washington Post, October 29, 2000 and August 24, 2000; Bradley, Bill, Time Present, Time Past: A Memoir (New York, 1996), 409.Google Scholar

² Newsday, July 8, 2001; Kristol, Irving, “Don't Count Out Conservatism,” New York Times Magazine, June 14, 1987Google Scholar; Morris, Edmund, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Morris, , Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan (New York, 1999).Google Scholar For an argument about how little the current White House lives up to the Theodore Roosevelt tradition, see Herman, Daniel Justin, “What TR Would Have Made of Bush/Cheney,” History News Network, June 27, 2001Google Scholar, http://historynewsnetwork.org/articles/article.html?id=109

³ Eisenach, Eldon J., The Lost Promise ofProgressivism (Lawrence, KS, 1994), 6Google Scholar; Judis, John B., Grand Illusion: Critics and Champions of the American Century (New York, 1992), 23–45Google Scholar; Lind, Michael, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York, 1995), 301Google Scholar; Dionne, E. J. Jr., They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era (New York, 1996), 15Google Scholar; Schudson, Michael, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (New York, 1998), 147Google Scholar; Sandel, Michael J., Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA, 1996), 201–49Google Scholar (quote, 207). For a work that “implies the irretrievability of Progressivism per se, contrary to a considerable recent literature betting on its imminent resurrection,” see Rauchway, Eric, The Refuge of Affections: Family and American Reform Politics, 1900–1920 (New York, 2001), 28.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For a critique of much of this literature, see Isaac, Jeffrey C., “The Poverty of Progressivism,” Dissent 43 (Fall 1996): 40–49.Google Scholar Of course, not all political theorists agree about how to interpret early twentieth-century politics. While respecting the “populist” democratic impulses that underlay Progressivism, James Morone argues that in the end “the Progressives left behind a fragmented, unresponsive public administration dominated by narrow, private groups and self-interested state officials.” Morone, James A., The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York, 1990), 99.Google Scholar Similar skepticism of the Progressives pervades Hanson's, Russell L.The Democratic Imagination in America: Conversations with Our Past (Princeton, 1985), 223–56Google Scholar and, generally, Milkis, Sidney M. and Mileur, Jerome M., eds., Progressivism and the New Democracy (Amherst, 1999).Google Scholar

⁴ MacLean, Nancy, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York, 1994), 44.Google Scholar

⁵ I thus also do not provide here an exhaustive set of citations to the vast literature on the Progressive Era. For the best recent bibliographies on the subject, concluding excellent texts, see Diner, Steven J., A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York, 1998)Google Scholar and John Whiteclay Chambers, II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920, 2nd ed. with a new preface and updated bibliography (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000). Also see the introduction to Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (Boston, forthcoming). The textbook that most emphasizes the democratic possibilities of the age is Painter, Nell Irvin, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York, 1987).Google Scholar

⁶ Croly, Herbert, The Promise of American Life (New York, 1909)Google Scholar; Witt, Benjamin Parke De, The Progressive Movement (New York, 1915)Google Scholar; Chamberlain, John, Farewell to Reform: The Rise, Life, and Decay of the Progressive Mind in America (New York, 1932)Google Scholar; Charles, and Beard, Mary, The Rise of American Civilization, vol. III, rev. ed. (New York, 1933), 538–608Google Scholar; Faulkner, Harold Underwood, The Quest for Social Justice, 1898–1914 (New York, 1931).Google Scholar For a complex argument that also upholds La Follette as a, perhaps the, central player in democratic Progressi vism, see Unger, Nancy C., Fighting Bob La Follette: The Righteous Reformer (Chapel Hill, 2000).Google Scholar

⁷ Forcey, Charles, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippman, and the Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (New York, 1961), viiGoogle Scholar; Mowry, George E., The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America, 1900–1912 (New York, 1958), 86, 89, 88Google Scholar and The California Progressives (Berkeley, 1951), 96, 104, 100, 102, 92, 99. Unfortunately, Deverell, William and Sitton, Tom, eds., California Progressivism Revisited (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholar, does not directly engage Mowry's argument about the middle class or the general democratic potential of reform.

⁸ Besides Link's multi-volume biography, his most important work was Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era, 1910–1917 (New York, 1954); Blum, John Morton, The Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson (New York, 1980), 9Google Scholar, The Republican Roosevelt (Cambridge, MA, 1954), and Woodrow Wilson and the Politics of Morality (Boston, 1956). Goldman's, EricRendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform (New York, 1956 [1952])Google Scholar is a breezy narrative in the proud liberal reform tradition.

⁹ Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York, 1948)Google Scholar and The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F. D. R. (New York, 1955), 184, 131; Hays, Samuel P., The Response to Industrialism, 1885–1914 (Chicago, 1958)Google Scholar and Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency (Cambridge, MA, 1959); Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York, 1955), 236–37.Google Scholar

Among a voluminous critical literature on Hofstadter's book, see perhaps the best commentary: Alan Brinkley, “Hofstadter's The Age of Reform Reconsidered,” in Brinkley, , Liberalism and its Discontents (New York, 1998), 132–50.Google Scholar Hays continued his hard-nosed critique of Progressive rhetoric throughout the 1960s and 1970s, most impressively in his 1964 article “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the Progressive Era,” reprinted along with other important essays in Hays, Samuel P., American Political History as Social Analysis (Knoxville, TN, 1980), 205–32.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Forcey, Crossroads of Liberalism; Sklar, Martin J., “Woodrow Wilson and the Political Economy of Modern United States Liberalism,” Studies on the Left 1 (1960)Google Scholar, reprinted as “Woodrow Wilson and the Developmental Imperatives of Modern U.S. Liberalism,” in Sklar, , The United States as a Developing Country: Studies in U. S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (New York, 1992), 102–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Sklar unveils the term “corporate liberalism” almost in passing on 142.

¹¹ Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York, 1963), 1, 279, 305.Google Scholar The second most influential book in the historiography of Progressi vism, Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, did not engage contemporary civic debates or comment directly on the democratic qualities of Progressivism. Yet one can get a sense of Wiebe's take on the issue at the very least through the title of one of his chapters, “The Illusion of Fulfillment.” In any case, when Wiebe returned to the period in 1995, he furiously denounced Progressivism for destroying nineteenth-century mass democracy. See Wiebe, , Self-Rule: A Cultural History of Democracy (Chicago, 1995).Google Scholar

¹² Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968)Google Scholar; Lasch, Christopher, The New Radicalism in America: The Intellectual as a Social Type, 1889–1963 (New York, 1965), 146Google Scholar; Kraditor, Aileen, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890–1920 (New York, 1965).Google ScholarHaber, Samuel, Efficiency and Uplift: Scientific Management in the Progressive Era, 1880–1920 (Chicago, 1964)Google Scholar and Lustig, R. Jeffrey, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political Theory, 1880–1920 (Berkeley, 1982)Google Scholar are also important contributions to this scholarly tradition. A highly influential related work that underscored the ways that Progressivism facilitated the pathologies of interest-group politics is McConnell, Grant, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

¹³ Filene, Peter, “An Obituary for the ‘Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970): 20–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982) : 121CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Huthmacher, J. Joseph, “Urban Liberalism and the Age of Reform,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (September 1962): 231–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Buenker, John D., Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; McCormick, Richard L., “The Discovery that Business-Corrupts Politics: A Reappraisal of the Origins of Progressivism,” in McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986 [1981]), 311–56Google Scholar and From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893–1910 (Ithaca, 1981); Thelen, David P., The New Citizenship: Origins of Progressivism in Wisconsin, 1885–1900 (Columbia, MO, 1972)Google Scholar, Robert M. La Follette and the Insurgent Spirit (Boston, 1976), and “Two Traditions of Progressive Reform, Political Parties, and American Democracy,” in Bonomi, Patricia, Burns, James MacGregor, and Ranney, Austin, eds., The American Constitutional System Under Strong and Weak Parties (New York, 1981): 37–79Google Scholar; Boyer, Paul, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1978)Google Scholar; Kousser, J. Morgan, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, 1974)Google Scholar; McGerr, Michael, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865–1928 (New York, 1986).Google Scholar McGerr and Kousser were following in the steps of the influential political scientist Walter Dean Burnham, who emphasized the anti-democratic nature of Progressive Era political reforms. See esp. Burnham, , Critical Elections and the Mainspring of American Politics (New York, 1970)Google Scholar; for a more recent book in this tradition, see Kombluh, Mark Lawrence, Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics (New York, 2000).Google Scholar Another political scientist during this period saw governmental “incoherence and fragmentation” as “the destructive consequences of constructive reform initiatives.” Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1982), viii, 287.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

A collection that “display[s] a more positive attitude toward the achievements of this period than might have been the case even a few years earlier” is Gould, Lewis L., ed., The Progressive Era (Syracuse, 1974), v.Google Scholar Other books from this period stressing the era's democratic qualities include Salvatore, Nick, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, 1982)Google Scholar and Danbom, David, “The World of Hope”: Progressives and the Struggle for an Ethical Public Life (Philadelphia, 1987).Google Scholar The best recent work in the Huthmacher-Buenker tradition is Connolly, James J., The Triumph of Ethnic Progressivism: Urban Political Culture in Boston, 1900–25 (Cambridge, MA, 1998).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Kloppenberg, James T., Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York, 1986), 415, 5Google Scholar; Westbrook, Robert, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991) , esp. 182–89.Google Scholar A further reflection on “generous and passionate intellectuals who expanded the very meaning of American democracy by their practical visions” is Fink, Leon, Progressive Intellectuals and the Dilemmas of Democratic Commitment (Cambridge, MA, 1997), 287.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and United States as a Developing Country, chs. 1–2; Livingston, James, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940 (Chapel Hill, 1994)Google Scholar and Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American History (New York, 2001). Livingston's earlier work, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890–1913 (Ithaca, 1986) also developed in an important way the idea of the contingent origins of corporate capitalism, as does Roy, William G. in Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, 1997).Google Scholar These works represent promising exceptions to the troubling decline of economic histories of the period.

¹⁶ Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 524.Google Scholar For a sharp give-and-take over Skocpol's ideas, see Gordon, Linda, “Gender, State, and Society: A Debate With Theda Skocpol,” Contention 2 (Spring 1993): 138–56Google Scholar; Skocpol, , “Gendered Identities in Early U.S. Social Policy,” Contention 2 (Spring 1993): 157–83Google Scholar; and Gordon, , “Response to Theda Skocpol,” Contention 2 (Spring 1993): 185–89.Google Scholar Another work by a sociologist that effectively demonstrates the deepening of the era's popular politics is Clemens, Elisabeth S., The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890–1925 (Chicago, 1997).Google Scholar

¹⁷ For an excellent early survey, see Lebsock, Suzanne, “Women and American Politics, 1880–1920,” in Women, Politics, andChange, eds., Tilly, Louise and Gurin, Patricia (New York, 1990): 33–62.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780–1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gordon, Linda, Pitied but Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Gordon, , ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, WI, 1990)Google Scholar; Michel, Sonya, Children's Interests/Mothers' Rights: The Shaping of America's Child Care Policy (New Haven, 1999)Google Scholar; Goodwin, Joanne L., Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform: Mothers' Pensions in Chicago, 1911–1929 (Chicago, 1996)Google Scholar; Willrich, Michael, “Home Slackers: Men, the State, and Welfare in Modern America,” Journal of American History 87 (September 2000): 460–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The best review of this issue is Wilkinson, Patrick, “The Selfless and the Helpless: Materr.alist Origins of the U.S. Welfare State,” Feminist Studies 25 (Fall 1999): 571–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For two excellent recent studies of woman suffrage, see Terborg-Penn, Rosalyn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850–1920 (Bloomington, 1998)Google Scholar and Gullett, Gayle, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women's Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana, 2000).Google Scholar

¹⁹ Davis, Allen F., Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Perry, Elisabeth Israels, Belle Moskowitz: Feminine Politics and the Exercise of Power in the Age of Alfred E. Smith (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Frankel, Noralee and Dye, Nancy S., eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington, KY, 1991)Google Scholar; Scott, Anne Firor, Natural Allies: Women's Associations in American History (Urbana, 1991), 167Google Scholar; Muncy, Robyn, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890–1935 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Sklar, Kathryn Kish, “The Historical Foundations of Women's Power in the Creation of the American Welfare State, 1830–1930,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, eds., Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya (New York, 1993): 43–93Google Scholar; Sklar, , Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work: The Rise of Women's Political Culture, 1830–1930 (New Haven, 1995)Google Scholar; Ethington, Philip J., “Recasting Urban Political History: Gender, the Public, the Household, and Political Participation in Boston and San Francisco during the Progressive Era,” Social Science History 16 (Summer 1992): 301–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For an important reflection on this issue, see Perry, Elisabeth Israels, “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (January 2002): 25–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Flanagan's, Maureen vindication of women's political culture, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, 2002).Google Scholar It is also worth noting that even though the emphasis of this scholarship has been on non-partisan political activity, women were deeply involved in party politics of the period. See Edwards, Rebecca, Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1997), 150–66Google Scholar; Gustafson, Melanie, “Partisan Women in the Progressive Era: The Struggle for Inclusion in American Political Parties,” Journal of Women's History 9 (Summer 1997): 8–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and many of the chapters in Gustafson, Melanie, Miller, Kristie, and Perry, Elisabeth I., eds., We Have Come to Stay: American Women and Political Parties, 1880–1960 (Albuquerque, 1999).Google Scholar

²⁰ Bederman, Gail, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (Chicago, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York, 2000), 217Google Scholar; Gaines, Kevin K., Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar A biography that emphasizes the openness of the period's politics is Schechter, Patricia A., Ida B. Wells-Barnett and American Reform, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 2001).Google Scholar Significant treatments of the nadir of American race relations that do not engage the issue of Progressi vism include Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998)Google Scholar and Litwack, Leon, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York, 1998).Google Scholar

Smith, Rogers M., Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, 1997), 410–69Google Scholar (quote on 469), emphasizes how “centrist progressives” such as TR who championed “Americans as the world's greatest master race” easily overwhelmed the “left progressivism” of thinkers such as John Dewey. For a more complex reading of the Progressive Era, one that emphasizes both the racialized construction of the American nation and apowerful civic nationalist tradition — forged by none other than Theodore Roosevelt — that could “advance the causes of both social democracy and racial equality,” see Gerstle, Gary, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), 12.Google Scholar In the end, the judgment of Morton Keller is sound: “The years after 1900 saw dramatic growth not only in the intensity but also in the diversity of debate over racial policy. True, Progressivism gave new life to legal segregation. But it reinvigorated the American tradition of equality before the law as well. While social and cultural pluralism fueled racial animosity, it could (and did) also reinforce policies of tolerance and inclusion.” Keller, , Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 257.Google Scholar An older book that stressed the “widening human sympathies of the progressive era” in matters of race and immigration is Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1955), 122.Google Scholar

²¹ Gilmore, Glenda Elizabeth, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 150Google Scholar; Shaw, Stephanie J., What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do: Black Professional Women Workers During the Jim Crow Era (Chicago, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 187.Google Scholar For another generally positive perspective on middle-class black women's politics of uplift, see Knupfer, Anne Meis, Towarda Tenderer Humanity and a Nobler Womanhood: African American Women's Clubs in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New York, 1996)Google Scholar; for a social history that is much more critical of the black middle class, see Gordon, Fon Louise, Caste and Class: The Black Experience in Arkansas, 1880–1920 (Athens, GA, 1995).Google Scholar An important rehabilitation of rural black Progressives is Reid, Debra A., “African Americans, Community Building, and the Role of the State in Rural Reform in Texas, 1890s–1930s,” in The Countryside in the Age of the Modem Stale: Political Histories of Rural America, eds., Stock, Catherine McNicol and Johnston, Robert D. (Ithaca, 2001): 38–65.Google Scholar

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²³ Lasch, Christopher, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics (New York, 1991), 330, 360.Google Scholar Lasch went after the middle class/bourgeoisie most insistently in The New Radicalism. I follow Lasch's political and intellectual insights in my forthcoming The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton, 2002) but go even further in arguing for the economic and intellectual viability of twentieth-century petit bourgeois radicalism. Andrew Wender Cohen offers similar insights in “Obstacles to History: Modernization and the Lower Middle Class in Chicago, 1900–1940,” in Bledstein, and Johnston, , The Middling Sorts, 189–200.Google Scholar

²⁴ Mattson, Kevin, Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy During the Progressive Era (University Park, PA, 1998)Google Scholar; Zimmerman, Jonathan, Distilling Democracy: Alcohol Education in America's Public Schools, 1880–1925 (Lawrence, KS, 1999).Google Scholar

²⁵ Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar; Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago, 1999).Google Scholar For an extended discussion ofSanders as well as Rodgers, see Johnston, Robert D., “Peasants, Pitchforks, and the (Found) Promise of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 28 (September 2000): 393–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Historians critical of direct democracy include Lipow, Arthur, Authoritarian Socialism in America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley, 1991 [1982])Google Scholar and Political Parties and Democracy: Explorations in History and Theory (London, 1996); and Goebel, Thomas, A Government By The People: The Initiative and Referendum in America,1890–1940 (Chapel Hill, forthcoming).Google Scholar For a defense of direct democracy, see Johnston, The Radical Middle Class; Sarah Henry presents a middle ground in Progressive Democracy: Remaking the Vote in the United States, 1888–1919 (New York, forthcoming). For an impressive study of political structure and institutions, see Reynolds, John F., Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1988)Google Scholar; see also Keyssar, Alexander, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000).Google Scholar On foreign affairs, see Johnson, Robert David, The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations (Cambridge, MA, 1995)Google Scholar and McKillen, Elizabeth, Chicago Labor and the Quest for a Democratic Diplomacy, 1914–1924 (Ithaca, 1995).Google Scholar On the agency of non-whites, see Benjamin Heber Johnson, America's Unknown Rebellion: The Plan de San Diego Uprising and the Forging of Mexican American Identity (New Haven, forthcoming), as well as the still valuable Hertzberg, Hazel W., The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian Movements (Syracuse, 1971).Google Scholar An important reflection on ethnicity and progressive reform, which includes a recognition of the current political uses of Progressivism, is Connolly, James J., “Progressivism and Pluralism,” in American Public Life and the Historical Imagination, eds., Grossberg, Michael, Gamber, Wendy, and Hartog, Hendrik (South Bend, forthcoming).Google Scholar

²⁷ Michael McGerr also notes that “Progressivism, not the New Deal, may well be the most useful analog to liberalism at the end of the twentieth century.” See McGerr, “Progressivism,” in Fox, Richard Wightman and Kloppenberg, James T., eds., A Companion to American Thought (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 549.Google Scholar

²⁸ Lasch, True and Only Heaven, dedication. For a compelling companion argument, see Kevin Mattson, “History as Hope: The Legacy of the Progressive Era and the Future of Political Reform in America,” in Hayduk, Ronald and Mattson, Kevin, eds., Democracy's Moment: Reforming the American Political System for the list Century (New York, forthcoming).Google Scholar