A Fierce Discontent Review

1 McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. In A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920, Michael McGerr gives an historical overview of the Progressive era in America. In doing so he argues: That progressivism created much of our contemporary political predicament. The epic of reform at the dawn of the twentieth century helps explain the less-thanepic politics at the dawn of the twenty-first. Progressivism, the creed of the crusading middle-class, offered the promise of utopianism--- and generated the inevitable letdown of unrealistic expectations. (xiv) He explains that this Progressive creed created a too broad range of expectations. These expectations included ending class conflict, controlling big business, segregation, purification of politics, and the disciplining of leisure time. In order to prove his argument McGerr studies the Victorian middle-class or what he and many scholars call the Progressives. He takes this Victorian middle-class and analyses four main examples of their struggles. These struggles consisted of the battles to reform society to their standards. McGerr explains that these standards were a medium between what he called mutualism and individualism. Mutualism was the concept that the family or community all helped out in the means of production and survival. Individualism is where one promotes self-help or self-reliance in achieving their goals rather than the communities or families goals. McGerr uses these concepts to show how the Victorian middle-class thought that the working-class was too extreme with their mutualism and the upper ten were too extreme with their individualism. The struggles that McGerr focuses on include the control of big business, to change other people, to end

2 class-conflict, and to segregate people. (xv) McGerr uses the terms, mutualism and individualism to explain many things about the Progressive movement and this eventually leads up to the conclusion and main argument of his book. That argument is that this movement created a middle-class with aspirations for a better world and their lack of success explains the weak politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. McGerr has provided the historical world with a very scholarly piece of work. He has achieved to the utmost by providing the academic world with an overview of the Progressive era, who the Progressives actually were, and how much success these middle-class reformers achieved or did not achieve. Although McGerr provides the reader with an excellent source that is full of remarkable and efficient amounts of research and organization, he does not consistently follow his argument. He does clearly state what he is arguing, but struggles with actually focusing on his main point. It seems as though the real argument of his book deals more with whom the Victorians were and why they pushed so much for reform. McGerr’s book actually argues that the stresses of industrializing America fractured old ideologies and created new ones, including Progressivism and the Victorian middle-class. This Victorian middle-class tried to answer the basic questions of society and in doing so created this ideology of reform and compared their answers to that of the worldviews. McGerr’s book is a great source and solid read for an overview of the Progressive era, but his focus on his argument is weak and could confuse the reader. John C. McKnight Appalachian State University

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