Until comparatively recently, historians treated progressivism of the early twentieth century variety as if it were a purely American affair. In 1952, Eric F. Goldman argued that progressivism was ‘as exclusively national a movement as the United States ever knew’. But in the years that followed, a number of works appeared which challenged the validity of this narrowly national interpretation. Arthur Mann, in 1956, suggested that American reformers were much influenced by British social thought. Gertrude Almy Slichter drew attention to the European background of American reform in a 1960 dissertation. A number of essays then showed that progressivism itself could be regarded as part of an international movement. Peter F. Clarke pointed out that there had been a progressive movement in England which, in fact, predated the American equivalent. Kenneth O. Morgan, reviewing the nature of the links between British and American reformers, thought it meaningful to write in terms of ‘ Anglo-American Progressivism’. Other historians, looking at the matter in a more general, European context, were struck by the apparent similarities between American progressives, British Liberals or Labourites, and French and German socialists. George E. Mowry argued that American progressives should be regarded as part of western ‘social democracy’. Arthur A. Ekirch came to much the same conclusion.

Dime and pulp writers were always hacks, in Walter Benjamin's terms, because, from the beginning of the dime novel in 1860 to the end of the pulp magazine around 1950, they consistently subscribed to the conditions of labour in the ‘fiction factories’. These writers came into being when mass literature began in the United States. Their main product was Western fiction, since enthusiasm for the West coincided with the technological innovations which made these forms of commercial publishing possible. Hacks were hired by dime novel and, later, pulp magazine firms to churn out formulaic Westerns to their employers' stipulations. This they did without protest: in interviews and biographies, hack writers talk of the advantages of regimented production and they emphasize the financial rewards. One Beadle and Adams author says, ‘The only men, as a class, in America today, who are able to live by pure literary labor, are the writers of what you call ‘dime novels’, that is to say, of books written for the largest possible market in this country.’ In their fiction, they invariably complied with publishers' directives, writing popular imitations of James Fenimore Cooperand Robert Montgomery Bird.

Few American presidential elections have engaged the passions of contemporaries or exercised the imaginations of later generations more than the ‘log cabin’ campaign of 1840. By their parades, slogans, symbols and songs party managers deliberately played down questions of public policy likely to divide their ranks, reasoned discussion was overwhelmed by an organized torrent of feeling, and the carefully cultivated images of candidates obscured the reality of their outlooks. Unscrupulous propagandists, especially of the Whig party, undoubtedly manipulated the emotions of the electorate. The excitement carried a massive 80·2 per cent of voters to the polls, a huge increase in turnout over previous presidential elections and a level of participation exceeded in no subsequent campaign. William Henry Harrison was indeed, as Philip Hone put it, ‘sung into the Presidency’

Yet style alone did not create the passion. The economic distress consequent upon the Panic of 1837 allowed the Whigs to act as a focus for those who blamed the Democrats for the hard times and who looked for a more vigorous stimulus to capitalist development than Martin Van Buren was likely to provide.

Printed as poetry this representative passage from Fitzgerald's first novel differs from the post-1915 debasement of Imagism (what Ezra Pound called ‘Amygism’) in only two significant aspects: it has a higher incidence of rhyme and is, if possible, even more devoid of content. Its voice defines the novel's protagonist, Amory Blaine, much more memorably than do his character and actions. Derived from the vaguely erotic style Pater developed in Marius the Epicurean (1885) and popularized by Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), this verbal swoon, made over into a Princeton accent, places Fitzgerald in the Romantic Decadence. Its derivative quality should not, however, blind us to the work it entailed for Fitzgerald, accumulating these inter-echoes during the re-writings of the novel.