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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