Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) (Hardcover)

by Alan Dawley (Author) "At the dawn of the twentieth century in a climate of hope and promise a new internationalism took wing..." (more)
Key Phrases: growing world consciousness, progressive internationalism, retreat from reform, United States, New York, New Deal (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
In this sprawling, ambitious work, Dawley, a professor of history at the College of New Jersey, expertly places the history of American progressives' quest for peace and social justice before, during and after WWI in an international context. While examining a subject as vast as progressivism precluded Dawley from delving too deeply into any one aspect of the movement, interested readers will surely find this a useful and unique synthesis of social and political history. In clean, well-paced prose, Dawley sets the successes and the failures of early American progressives, including Jane Addams and Robert La Follette, against the backdrop of a complicated postwar world in which sleeping giants had awakened in China, Russia and Mexico; where social mores and sexual values were rapidly changing; and where laborers, women and people of various ethnicities were beginning the struggle for their rights in earnest. Especially noteworthy is Dawley's treatment of the nascent League of Nations and Woodrow Wilson's famous 14 Points, delivered in 1918, which Dawley declares a stunning manifesto and an extraordinary gesture... that resonated with the best in American history. Although at times an exhausting read, if simply for the sheer breadth of progressive history worldwide, Dawley, winner of the prestigious Bancroft Prize in history for his 1977 book Class and Community, succeeds in his quest to trace to common philosophical roots an array of thinkers, writers, politicians, national movements, revolutions, leaders and their causes: winning social and economic justice, revitalizing public life, and improving the wider world. This is an especially timely book, given the tense state of world affairs. 10 b&w photos.
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Review
Clean, well-paced prose. . . . This is an especially timely book, given the tense state of world affairs. -- Publishers Weekly

In clean, well-paced prose, Dawley sets the successes--and failures--of early American progressives . . . against the backdrop of a complicated postwar world. . . . This is an especially timely book, given the tense state of world affairs. -- Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 424 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (February 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 069111322X
• ISBN-13: 978-0691113227
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #916,416 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars So Disappointing!, December 30, 2003

By A Customer

What a wonderful and timely topic! Such frustrating execution! Readers will find some passages and myriad phrases repeated multiple times (compare, e.g., pp. 33 and 171, for an especially egregious example). Readers will find many petty but not insignificant mistakes: the Sixteenth Amendment (not the Seventeenth) authorized the federal income tax (p. 121); John Davis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1924, was never governor of Ohio (p. 327); Robert Lansing was Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of State, but not his son-in-law (p. 246), though Secretary of the Treasury William McAdoo was; the women in the photo at p. 332 are misidentified in the caption, though this appears to have been an archivist's mistake before it was Dawley's; etc.

All this, of course, is very strange for a book by the author of the distinguished 1976 book, Class and Community. The book arises out of superb historical instincts, and it has some real gems (e.g., the fascinating War Plans White developed by the Army War College to combat domestic revolutions). Too bad the execution is so mixed, and too bad the editors at Princeton University Press seem not to have bothered to do much editing!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Valuable study of the Progressives' domestic and foreign-policy agendas, October 18, 2006

By	Excerpt from "The Independent Review" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution (Politics and Society in Twentieth Century America) (Paperback)

CHANGING THE WORLD is a valuable study of the Progressive movement from the hand of a sympathetic yet critical historian. It is written in clear, breathable prose. Imaginatively reentering a distant yet oddly familiar world, Dawley "reads" history forward as the participants experienced it, keeping questions open (p. 107) and stressing the actual choices possible to real historical actors (pp. 130-31). Despite his own ideological preferences, he refuses to connect events into a predetermined pattern that appears inevitable only in hindsight to smug historians, although his formulaic and repeated use of race, class, and gender becomes tiresomely predictable.

Commendably, Dawley attempts to "internationalize" historians' understanding of the Progressives, an effort that can be carried even further. He explores the international context in which the Progressive mind took shape and in which the American reform agenda developed in cooperation with like-minded or even more radical reformers in Europe. He also "internationalizes" the historical analysis of the Progressives by measuring them against successes and failures elsewhere and by recapturing a clearer sense of the range of options that might have been available to them.

Unfortunately, the book is marred by a number of historical errors. The income tax, for example, was made constitutional by the Sixteenth Amendment, not the Seventeenth (p. 121), and the words "last best hope on earth" appear nowhere in Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (p. 128). The book's frequent typographical errors are also distracting. In short, the manuscript needed a good scrubbing by a copyeditor with his sleeves rolled up.