Our Victorian Ancestors

"You are the heirs of one of the country's great traditions, the Progressive movement that started late in the nineteenth century and remade the American experience piece by piece," Bill Moyers told a throng of liberal Democrats who recently gathered in a Washington hotel to plan the defeat of George W. Bush. What made Progressivism so great, according to Moyers, was its nonviolent war on the Gilded Age plutocracy, which, aided by such clever rogues as Mark Hanna, had "strangled" the promise of social equality "in the hard grip of a merciless ruling class."

It's an eminently usable past. If Karl Rove styles himself a twenty-first-century Hanna, fashioning a new era of Republican dominance, then why can't the postmodern left be the second coming of Robert La Follette and Jane Addams--those inspiring figures, in and out of office, who challenged the politics of laissez-faire cupidity and began to make the United States a fairer, more humane society?

Only a hopeless pedant would dismiss the value of history as a motivating force for the living. But contemporary "progressives" would be wise to look more closely at the white middle-class crusaders who coined the name before they rush to emulate their achievements. Michael McGerr's consistently intelligent, superbly crafted survey, A Fierce Discontent, is a fine place to start.

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