Abstract
For the years 1870–1914, the concept of Progressivism—which is integral to understanding U.S. history—appears in no standard surveys of British history. This is even true of recent studies of Anglo-American attitudes.1 Given the interest of scholars in other Anglo-American cultural connections in the nineteenth century—abolitionism, revivalism, immigration, temperance reform, and political ideology—what explains this paucity of research?2 Perhaps, British historian C. L. Mowat reflected, it is because historians in each country write history differently. In the United States, historians conceptualized reform as emanating from a constellation of ideas, whereas those in Britain viewed it as entirely isolated from other issues, and thus as the product of individuals or organizations.3 Though American historians studied reform as a form of a history of ideas, they ironically failed to see the cultural exchange between Progressives in each country. Abandoning this compartmentalized approach to studying these years and using Progressivism as an organizing concept produces an entirely new way of seeing these years, both in Britain and the United States.
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Notes
Fred M. Leventhal and Roland Quinault, eds., Anglo-American Attitudes: From Revolution to Partnership (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).
See for example, Frank Thistlethwaite, The Anglo-American Connection in the Early Nineteenth Century (New York: Russell & Russell, 1959);
Richard Carwardine, Transatlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1978);
Howard Temperley, “The British and American Abolitionists Compared,” in The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists, ed. Martin B. Duberman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1965), 343–61;
Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Antislavery Cooperation (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972);
Henry Pelling, America and the British Left: From Bright to Bevan (New York: New York University Press, 1957);
Clifton K. Yearley, Britons in American Labor: A History of the Influence of the United Kingdom Immigrants on American Labor, 1820–1914 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957);
Robert Kelley, The Transatlantic Persuasion: The Liberal-Democratic Mind in the Age of Gladstone (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969).
C. L. Mowat, “Social Legislation in Britain and the United States in the early Twentieth Century: A Problem in the History of Ideas,” Historical Studies 7 (1969): 81–82.
Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (1982): 127, n. 1;
Liselotte Glage, Clementina Black: A Study in Social History and Literature (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1981), 39;
James Robert Moore, “Progressive Pioneers: Manchester Liberalism, the Independent Labour Party, and Local Politics in the 1890s,” Historical Journal 44 (2001): 1003–4;
Peter Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 171, 397–98;
Peter Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 122, 140;
Sydney Nevile, The First Half-Century: A Review of the Developments of the Licensed Trade and the Improvement of the Public House during the Past Fifty Years (London: n.p. 1949);
Sydney O. Nevile, “The Improved Public-House Movement,” House of Whitbread 3 (1926): 2;
David Blaazer extends the thesis of a prewar Progressive movement into the 1930s, portraying supporters of the Popular Front as the survivors of Edwardian Progressivism or its heirs. Marc Stears, Progressives, Pluralists, and the Problems of the State: Ideologies of Reform in the United States and Britain, 1909–26 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002);
David Blaazer, The Popular Front andthe Progressive Tradition: Socialists, Liberals, and the Quest for Unity, 1884–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 20–23, 25.
Arthur Mann, “British Social Thought and American Reformers of the Progressive Era,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 42 (1956): 672–92.
Morton Keller, “Anglo-American Politics, 1900–30, in Anglo-American Perspective: A Case Study in Comparative History,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 22 (1980): 458–77;
Melvyn Stokes, “American Progressives and the European Left,” Journal of American Studies 17 (1983): 5–28.
Keller, “Anglo-American Politics,” 464, 477; also see Benjamin R. Beede, “Foreign Influences on American Progressivism,” Historian 45 (1983): 529–49.
Peter Clarke, “The Progressive Movement in England,” Transactions of the RoyalHistorical Society 24 (1974): 159–81; Mowat, “Social Legislation”;
Michael Bentley, The Climax of Liberal Politics: British Liberalism in Theory and Practice, 1868–1918 (London: Edward Arnold, 1987), 138–45.
Kenneth O. Morgan, “The Future at Work: Anglo-American Progressivism, 1890–1917,” in Contrast and Connection: Bicentennial Essays in Anglo-American History, ed. H. C. Allen and Roger Thompson (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976), 245–71.
For one unfavorable review, see David Smith in Albion 17 (1985): 123–24. Altogether Portable Utopia was reviewed in just two other scholarly journals, the Journal of American History 17 (1984): 393, and the American Historical Review 90 (1985): 685.
Bernard Aspinwall, “Glasgow Trams and American Politics, 1894–1914,” Scottish Historical Review 56 (1977): 70–72, 76;
Bernard Aspinwall, Portable Utopia: Glasgow and the United States, 1820–1920, with a Comprehensive Biographical List of the Scots and Americans who Created the Connection (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), 151–52, 157–58, 168–70, 175–76, 178.
James T. Kloppenberg, “In Retrospect: Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America,” Reviews in American History 29 (2001): 469–70;
James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986);
E. P. Hennock, British Social Reform and German Precedents: The Case of Social Insurance, 1880–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 28–36.
Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1998), 69–71;
Robert Einhorn, Review of Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age, by Daniel Rodgers, Journal of Economic History 59 (1999): 1142.
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 3, 4, 51; Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” 113–32; Axel R. Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920: Social Ethics, Moral Control, and the Regulatory State in a Transatlantic Context (Stuggart: F. Steiner Verlag, 2000), 5.
Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 7, 32, 47, 50–52, 55, 58–59, 198, 250, 254, 407; Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” 113–32; Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 5; Einhorn’s review, 1142; also see John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890–1920, 2nd ed. (New York: Rutgers University Press, 2000).
Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (1970): 280, 282, 284, 287–88;
Louis Galambos, “Technology, Political Economy, and Professionalism: Central Themes of the Organizational Synthesis,” Business History Review 57 (1983): 485–91;
Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), 166;
Samuel P. Hays, “The New Organizational Society,” in Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America, ed. Jerry Israel (New York: Free Press, 1972), 1–15. The thesis has been recently restated in Chambers, Tyranny of Change, 140, 151.
Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: River Oram Press, 1996), 209–10, 216–19.
Clarke, Social Democrats, 119; Anthony Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain the United States and France, 1780–1914 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981), 86; Yeo, Social Science, 210, 216–19;
E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Fabians Reconsidered,” in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour, ed. Eric Hobsbawm (London: Basic Books, 1964), 250–71;
Arthur S. Link and Richard L. McCormick, Progressivism (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1983), 85.
Robert H. Wiebe, “The Progressive Years, 1900–17,” in The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture, ed. William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson Jr. (Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies, 1973), 435.
Thomas L. Haskell, “Taking Exception to Exceptionalism,” Reviews in American History 28 (2000): 161;
Nancy Schrom Dye, “Where Have All the Progressives Gone?” OAH Magazine of History 1 (Winter/Spring, 1986): 14.
Jack London, The People of the Abyss (London: Pitman, 1903);
Robert H. Sherard, At the Closed Door: Being the true and faithful account of an Experiment in Propria Persona of the Treatment Accorded to Pauper Emigrants in New York Harbour by the Officials of the American Democracy (London: Digby, Long & Company, 1902);
W.T. Stead, If Christ came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All who Love in the Service of All who Suffer (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1894);
Olive Christian Malvery, The Soul Market, with which is included “The Heart of Things” (London: Hutchinson, 1907), ch. 5, “The British ‘Jungle.’”
Ian Tyrrell, “Beyond the View from Euro-America: Environment, Settler Societies, and the Internationalization of American History,” in Rethinking AmericanHistory in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (London: University of California Press, 2002), 168–69. For an overview of the development, see the forum, “The New British History in Atlantic Perspective,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 426–524.
Peter Coleman’s intriguing study of the impact of New Zealand’s social policies on the United States overlooked entirely how these ideas sometimes became further diffused to Canada and Britain. See Peter J. Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987).
Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History,” American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1055.
David Armitage, “Greater Britain: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis?” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 442. Rodgers’ study had just appeared the previous year, but even so the historical literature on Anglo-American cultural exchanges in the nineteenth century was considerable. See Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism,” 1050–51.
Daniel T. Rodgers, “An Age of Social Politics,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (London: University of California Press, 2002), 264–65.
Tyrrell, “Beyond the View from Euro-America,” 169–70; Marc Bloch, “A Contribution towards a Comparative History of European Societies,” in Land and Work in Mediaeval Europe: Selected Papers, ed. Marc Bloch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 44–81.
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© 2008 David W. Gutzke
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Gutzke, D.W. (2008). Historians and Progressivism. In: Gutzke, D.W. (eds) Britain and Transnational Progressivism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614970_2
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