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Bookends: Seven Stories Excised from the Lost Promise of Progressivism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Eldon Eisenach
Eldon Eisenach
Affiliation:
University of Tulsa
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Extract

[Author's note: Excising large chunks from book manuscripts is a common practice and rarely a loss to scholarly literature. Originally appended to various parts of my book manuscript on the intellectual origins of American Progressivism were seven stories to which I had become quite attached. I was surprised, therefore, when early readers suggested that I drop them because they interrupted the narrative flow of the text. I resisted this advice until their judgment was seconded by later readers and editors. Cut them I did. But to cut is not necessarily to run. They are offered separately here because they capture some of the main themes of The Lost Promise of Progressivism and indirectly call into question some major interpretive frameworks of American Progressivism, both as a system of ideas and as a defining moment in American political culture. They were to me something like minor Epiphanies, suddenly shifting my gaze and clarifying my views.]

Type
Perspective
Information
Studies in American Political Development , Volume 10 , Issue 1 , Spring 1996 , pp. 168 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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3. Ibid., 11.

4. Ibid., 11–12.

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13. Crunden, Ministers of Reform, 43.

14. Ibid., 40–51; Dombrowski, James, The Early Days of Christian Socialism in America (New York: Octagon Books, 1966Google Scholar, reprint of 1936 edition), 171–93.

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17. Ibid., 275.

18. During this same period, popular Jewish writers such as Mary Antin (From Plotzk to Boston, The Promised Land) and Israel Zangwill (The Melting Pot, Children of the Ghetto) expressed these same ideas. Both of these writers were published in Lyman Abbott's Outlook and became associated with Theodore Roosevelt.

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26. Ibid., 555–57.

27. White taught for a time at Michigan under Henry Tappan. Tappan, from upstate New York, was a Congregational clergymen, philosopher, and theologian. He was president of the University of Michigan from 1852 to 1863. In a book in 1851 and a collection of articles and lectures in 1858, Tappan vigorously defended the German idea of the university against both the English university and the American denominational college-cum-university, rehearsing many of the themes that became dominant after the Civil War. Excerpts from these books are presented in Hofstadter and Smith, American Higher Education, 488–511 and 515–45, as founding documents in the articulation of the values and purposes of a true university in America.

28. Balogh, Brian, “Democratizing Expertise: State Building and the Progressive Legacy,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, Georgia, 09 1989, 18Google Scholar.

29. Ibid., 19–21.

30. Ibid., 22 and 29–30; and see Balogh, “Reorganizing the Organizational Synthesis,” 127–40.

31. Quoted from Fitzpatrick, Ellen, Endless Crusade: Women Social Scientists and Progressive Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 95Google Scholar, and see 14–16, 52–58, and 92–129 for the biography of Davis. No bleeding heart, her treatment of those who refused to reform was strict isolation from the salvageable prison population, saying “it is the duty of the State to … segregate and colonize these women who are dangerous to the [prison] community who are moral imbeciles, just as we have colonized the mental imbeciles.” Ibid., 99.

32. Ibid., 105–06. This happened two years before the establishment of the Rockefeller Foundation. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had been foreman of a grand jury convened in New York City in 1910 to investigate prostitution.

33. Ibid., 110–11. The secretary of the Rockefeller Bureau took the title in his name and leased the property to the reformatory for a nominal amount.

34. Ibid., 110.

35. Ibid., 107. New York charity and penal institutions had an earlier experience of self-constituted bodies acting as the state. An article in Century magazine in 1882 calls the reader's attention to “A Great Charity Reform” begun a decade earlier. The States Charities Aid Association consisted of volunteer groups of women who continuously inspected poor houses and similar institutions and wrote reports suggesting changes in operations, organization, and administration. These self-constituted bodies were, through state legislation, “appointed” by the State Board of Charities authorizing them to enter the institutions, inspect their records, etc. See Smally, E. V., “A Great Charity Reform,” Century 2 (07, 1882): 401–08Google Scholar.