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The Struggle for America's Promise - Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital (Paperback)
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The Struggle for America's Promise - Equal Opportunity at the Dawn of Corporate Capital (Paperback)
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In The Struggle for America's Promise, Claire Goldstene seeks to
untangle one of the enduring ideals in American history, that of
economic opportunity. She explores the varied discourses about its
meaning during the upheavals and corporate consolidations of the
Gilded Age. Some proponents of equal opportunity seek to promote
upward financial mobility by permitting more people to participate
in the economic sphere thereby rewarding merit over inherited
wealth. Others use opportunity as a mechanism to maintain economic
inequality. This tension, embedded with the idea of equal
opportunity itself and continually reaffirmed by immigrant
populations, animated social dissent among urban workers while
simultaneously serving efforts by business elites to counter such
dissent. Goldstene uses a biographical approach to focus on key
figures along a spectrum of political belief as they struggled to
reconcile the inherent contradictions of equal opportunity. She
considers the efforts of Booker T. Washington in a post-Civil War
South to ground opportunity in landownership as an attempt to
confront the intersection of race and class. She also explores the
determination of the Knights of Labor to define opportunity in
terms of controlling one's own labor. She looks at the attempts by
Samuel Gompers through the American Federation of Labor as well as
by business elites through the National Association of
Manufacturers and the National Civic Federation to shift the focus
of opportunity to leisure and consumption. The Struggle for
America's Promise also includes such radical figures as Edward
Bellamy and Emma Goldman, who were more willing to step beyond the
boundaries of the discourse about opportunity and question economic
competition itself.
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