Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 July 2014
A little over thirty years ago at the invitation of Stanley Kutler at Reviews in American History, I spent a summer trying to puzzle through the historiography surrounding Progressive Era society and politics. “In Search of Progressivism” the result was titled, and it has had a much longer life than most historiographical pieces of that sort do. Many excellent historiographical treatments of the Progressive Era have been published since that essay's appearance in 1982, along with a huge amount of historical writing. The field has burgeoned in ways that were barely visible thirty years ago. And yet the essay endures, and from time to time I think of revisiting and revising it.
1 Rodgers, Daniel T., “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 113–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a survey of the current state of the field, Johnston, Robert D., “The Possibilities of Politics: Democracy in America, 1877 to 1917” in American History Now, eds. Foner, Eric and McGirr, Lisa (Philadelphia, 2011), 96–124Google Scholar.
2 McGerr, Michael, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York, 2003)Google Scholar; Lears, Jackson, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York, 2009)Google Scholar.
3 Wiebe, Robert, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968)Google Scholar; Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., American Political History as Social Analysis (Knoxville, TN, 1980)Google Scholar.
4 A full, word-searchable data base of presidential messages and speeches can be found at the American Presidency Project, eds. John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/. Hobson, J. A., The Evolution of Modern Capitalism (London, 1894)Google Scholar, played a key role in the transmission of the term “capitalism” into academic social science, but as late as the 1910s not many American social scientists had yet followed Hobson's example. For an alternative reading of these themes, see Sklansky, Jeffrey, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9 (Apr. 2012): 233–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Odets, Clifford, Awake and Sing in Odets, Three Plays (New York, 1935), 33Google Scholar.
6 Dunlavy, Colleen A. and Welskopp, Thomas, “Myths and Peculiarities: Comparing U.S. and German Capitalism,” Bulletin of the German Historical Society 41 (Fall 2007): 33–64Google Scholar.
7 Esping-Andersen, Gøsta, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Princeton, 1990)Google Scholar.
8 Rodgers, Daniel T., Age of Fracture (Cambridge, MA, 2011)Google Scholar.