American Intellectual History by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Author:Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen [Ratner-Rosenhagen, Jennifer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780190622466
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

From pragmatism to progressivism

The birth pangs of modernization at the turn of the century drew the attention of increasing numbers of educated, progressive, middle-class critics, who rejected the tenets of laissez-faire and survival of the fittest, as well as the nonexistent or ineffectual governmental oversight they produced. Highly educated in the most up-to-date academic research, progressives sought to merge scientific principles and practices of experimentation, organization, and efficiency for the moral betterment of society. Largely reformist, not radical in temperament, they sought not to reject capitalism and industrial democracy but rather to root out their excesses and weaknesses. The vast majority of progressive reformers had grown up in racially and religiously homogenous small towns, and they longed for that sense of community and belonging in the bustling, anonymous modern city. Through their writings and their activism, they posed a counterforce to Gilded Age immoderation and fragmentation and provided a new narrative for modernization that could knit together immigrant groups and native-born Americans, the haves and have-nots, a thriving industry and a robust social democracy. An emerging reform-minded journalist and former student of William James at Harvard, Walter Lippmann, wrote the landmark text of progressivism, Drift and Mastery: An Attempt to Diagnose the Current Unrest, in 1914. Showing the close relation between pragmatist impulses and progressive desires, Lippmann stressed, “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it.”

Though the reach of progressive reforms extended to rural communities, America’s industrializing cities became the main focus of their energies as they turned university campuses, civic institutions, and urban streets into laboratories for social improvement. A most vivid embodiment of pragmatist thought and urban progressive action was one of America’s foremost social reformers, Jane Addams, a pioneering social worker, activist, feminist, and pacifist. In 1889, together with her friend Ellen Gates Starr, she founded Hull House in Chicago, America’s first social settlement. Hull House primarily drew educated, native-born, middle-class women, who came to live and work with Chicago’s poor and immigrant communities. It offered a range of services, including day care for children, a library, employment assistance, classes in English and citizenship, and job training. Hull House reformers thus took seriously their work as urban scientists and the settlement house as a social laboratory.

Much like the Social Gospel and Christian Socialism of religious liberals and radicals of the same period, Addams maintained that progressive interventions would refashion economic, political, and public life to be more equitable, transparent, and just while also transforming the individuals who worked with them. She described the impulse as a “coöperative ideal” of mutual assistance, a form of exchange more in line with a democracy of equals. If she sought a collaboration between America’s haves and have-nots, it was only to foster the conditions that could help end this distinction. The path to social improvement required rigorous social scientific analysis, testing, and application. Both

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.