Liberals and leftists in the United States have not always been
estranged from one another as they are today. Historian Doug
Rossinow examines how the cooperation and the creative tension
between left-wing radicals and liberal reformers advanced many of
the most important political values of the twentieth century,
including free speech, freedom of conscience, and racial
equality."Visions of Progress" chronicles the broad alliances of
radical and liberal figures who were driven by a particular concept
of social progress--a transformative vision in which the country
would become not simply wealthier or a bit fairer but fundamentally
more democratic, just, and united. Believers in this vision--from
the settlement-house pioneer Jane Addams and the civil rights
leader W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1890s and after, to the founders of
the ACLU in the 1920s, to Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson and
assorted labor-union radicals in the 1930s, to New Dealer Henry
Wallace in the 1940s--belonged to a left-liberal tradition in
America. They helped push political leaders, including Presidents
Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, toward
reforms that made the goals of opportunity and security real for
ever more Americans. Yet, during the Cold War era of the 1950s and
'60s, leftists and liberals came to view one another as enemies,
and their influential alliance all but vanished."Visions of
Progress" revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when
reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between
the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. Rossinow takes
the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection
was lost and explaining the consequences that followed. This book
introduces today's progressives to their historical predecessors,
while offering an ambitious reinterpretation of issues in American
political history.
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