Michael McGerr
Author of A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
About the Author
Works by Michael McGerr
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- McGerr, Michael
- Other names
- McGerr, Michael E. (fuller name)
- Birthdate
- 1955-01-15
- Gender
- male
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Statistics
- Works
- 5
- Members
- 355
- Popularity
- #67,468
- Rating
- 4.1
- Reviews
- 2
- ISBNs
- 21
McGerr ties the beginning of the Progressive Era to the Victorian middle class’ discontent with the upper class’ lavish lifestyle. He writes, “By the turn of the century, middle-class men and women, radicalized and resolute, were ready to sweep aside the upper ten and build a new, progressive America” (pg. 39). Alongside this conflict, “across Victorian America, women demanded new opportunities outside the home” (pg. 51). While the era witnessed many disparate conflicts, “the progressives, driven by their project to transform relations between men and women, end class conflict, and make the nation more middle-class, were almost always in the thick of the fighting” (pg. 79). McGerr demonstrates that progressives’ utopian idealism did not extend to race relations. He writes, “There were limits to the progressives’ optimistic faith in transforming other people. Segregation revealed both a sense of realism and an underlying pessimism in the middle class. Even as they labored urgently to end the differences between classes, the progressives felt some social differences would not be erased for many years. And some differences, they believed, could not be erased at all” (pg. 183). This led to an acceptance of Southern Jim Crow segregation and Northern segregation. McGerr traces the decline of progressivism to new entertainments and pleasure-seeking activities in the early 1900s (pg. 260) coupled with the Red Scare (pg. 306) and the “reemergence of political conservatism after years of defeat and demoralization” in the 1920 election (pg. 310). In his conclusion, McGerr argues that the failure of progressivism limited policies that appeared to take similar approaches, such as the New Deal or the Great Society.
A Fierce Discontent draws upon social, political, and economic history and resembles Eric Foner’s Reconstruction in that it primarily synthesizes much of the previous research on the subject while offering a new perspective through his use of vignettes, like that of Rahel Golub, that differ from the usual top-down approach to the Progressive Era.… (more)