Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Liberty and Coercion
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/7/1954
WEBSITE: http://www.garygerstle.com/
CITY: Cambridge, England
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: American
Lives in Cambridge, England, and in Cambridge, Mass. * http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/professor-gary-gerstle * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Gerstle *
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LOC not working, used WorldCat for bib
LC control no.: n 88102019
Descriptive conventions:
rda
Personal name heading:
Gerstle, Gary, 1954-
Birth date: 19540107
Found in: The Rise and fall of the New Deal order, 1930-1980, c1989:
CIP t.p. (Gary Gerstle) pub. info (b. 1/7/54; asst. prof.,
Dept. of History, Princeton Univ.)
Invalid LCCN: n 00041970
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born January 7, 1954.
EDUCATION:Brown University, B.A., 1976; Harvard University, M.A., Ph.D, 1982.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author, academic, and historian. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, director of Center for Historical Studies, 2000-03, chair of Department of History, 2003-06; Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, James G. Stahlman Professor of American History, beginning 2006; University of Oxford, Oxford, England, Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History, 2012-13; Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, Paul Mellon Professor of American History, and fellow, Sidney Sussex College, 2014-. Previously served as Annenberg Visiting Professor, University of Pennsylvania, and as visiting professor, the Écoles des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, France; also taught at Catholic University of America and Princeton University.
MEMBER:Royal Historical Society (fellow), Society of American Historians.
AWARDS:Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award, Immigration and Ethnic History Society, 2001, for American Crucible; Distinguished Lecturer, Organization of American Historians, 2007; Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians, 2016, for Liberty and Coercion.
WRITINGS
Also author, with Ronald Dore and others, of Teikoku gurobaruka jidai no demokurashi, Daigaku Daigakuin Hogaku Kenkyuka Fuzoku Koto Hosei Kyoiku Kenkyu Senta (Hokkaido, Japan). Author of introduction, Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal versus Changing Realities, M. Wiener (New York, NY), 1986; author of foreword, Many Voices, One Nation: Material Culture Reflections on Race and Migration to the United States, Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017. Contributor to books, including Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, editors, The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience, Russell Sage Foundation (New York, NY), 1999; John Tirman, editor, The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration after 9/11, New Press (New York, NY), 2004; Don H. Doyle and Marco A. Pamplona, editors, Nationalism in the New World, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 2006; Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, editors, Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 2006; Elliott R. Barkan, Hasia Diner, and Alan M. Kraut, editors, From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Era, New York University Press (New York, NY), 2008; John Milton Cooper, Jr., editor, Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace, Woodrow Wilson Center (Washington, DC)/Johns Hopkins University Press (Baltimore, MD), 2008; Michael Kazin, editor, In Search of Progressive America, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2008; Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, editors, Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2009; Desmond King and Lawrence Jacobs, editors, The Unsustainable American State, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2009; Julian Zelizer, editor, The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2010; Harvard Sitkoff, editor, Perspectives on Modern America: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2011; Jennifer Hochschild, Michael Jones-Correa, Claudine Gay, and Jennifer Chattopadhyay, editors, Outsiders No More? Models of Immigrant Political Incorporation, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2013; Nancy Foner and Patrick Simone, editors, Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity: Immigration and Belonging in North America and Western Europe, Russell Sage Foundation (New York, NY), 2015; Ronald Bayor, editor, Oxford Handbook of American Immigration and Ethnicity, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2016; Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan, editors, The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered: American Politics and Society in the Postwar Era, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2017. Contributor to professional journals, including American Historical Review, Dissent, Journal of American History, and Journal of the Civil War Era.
SIDELIGHTS
Cambridge University Paul Mellon Professor of American History Gary Gerstle is best known for his studies of twentieth-century American politics and society. “Gerstle’s interests are wide-ranging,” wrote the contributor of a biographical blurb to the Cambridge University Web site. “He has written extensively about immigration, race, and nationality, with a particular focus on how Americans have constituted (and reconstituted) themselves as a nation and the ways in which immigration and race have disrupted and reinforced that process. He has also studied the history of American political thought, institutions, and conflicts and maintains a long-standing interest in questions of class and class formation.” In works like Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, and Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, Gerstle examines the relationship between politics and government, on one hand, and work and labor, on the other. The Cambridge University professor is also the coeditor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, and he is the coauthor of the textbooks Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People and America Transformed: A History of the United States since 1900.
In Working-class Americanism—a volume that drew on his doctoral dissertation at Harvard—Gerstle examines the curious phenomenon of Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The small New England town was a center of textile production whose workforce was made up mostly of Francophones: people from either Quebec or Belgium and France itself. In the 1920s these two groups formed an independent union in which the two groups’ diverse political opinions were minimized. After World War II, however, the differences between the conservative French Canadians and the more liberal Franco-Belgians pushed the two groups apart. “Using a methodology rooted in historical materialism,” wrote Alan Dawley in the Nation, “Gerstle carefully grounds his study of political ideas in the evolution of twentieth-century society. Although he is one of a half-dozen scholars of twentieth-century industrial communities who follow the path laid out by social historians studying the nineteenth century, he uses the method with striking originality to tackle the thorny question of Americanism.” “Gerstle,” said David Bensman in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, “transforms Woonsocket’s story into a compelling investigation of the sources of the vitality and limitations of American labor in the twentieth century. By paying serious attention to the culture and, above all, the language used by Woonsocket workers and trade unionists, Gerstle brings into sharp focus a drama played out in hundreds of industrial towns in Depression-era America.” “Logically organized and clearly written,” asserted James R. Grossman in the Business History Review, “Working-class Americanism draws us into the world of Woonsocket’s French Canadian and Franco-Belgian working class.”
In The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, Gerstle and his coeditor Steven Fraser present a series of essays that try to explain the collapse of the liberal power bloc that greatly increased government power in the middle of the twentieth century. “The ‘New Deal order,’ Fraser and Gerstle argue, embodied a particular character that ‘decidedly shaped American political life for 40 years,’” declared Terry A. Cooney in the New Leader. “Because the epoch is over, they say, their contributors are able to write with a ‘sober and ironic tone’ distinct from both the ‘celebration’ of the New Deal by its early liberal chroniclers and the ‘condemnatory terms’ of 1960s radicals.” “By building on the insights of the new political science and history, the book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the New Deal legacy; advances our knowledge beyond the conflicting historiographical traditions,” stated Joe W. Trotter in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review. “In short, this study links changes in twentieth-century American political life to ‘crises in the nation’s economy, social structure, and political culture.’” “The New Deal order is dead, the victim of its own internal contradictions as well as of the changing economic and social conditions of modern American life,” concluded Susan Ware, writing in the Nation. “This volume is hardly the first to announce its demise. But by offering a new generation of scholars the chance to look beyond personalities and current events in order to explore underlying social and economic themes, a richer, more thoughtful portrayal of the New Deal legacy emerges.”
American Crucible is an analysis of the means through which American immigrant groups were turned, socially and politically, into American fellow-citizens. “The ideal of the multiracial, multicultural society,” explained a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “has always been influenced dynamically by the competing, very potent ideal of America as a white, Protestant country.” The conflict had its roots at the beginning of the twentieth century in the administration of Theodore Roosevelt. “At bottom, says Gerstle, Roosevelt and his backers envisioned an America where Europeans would quickly meld into the civic culture and where blacks would play a secondary role or none at all,” explained Joseph Dolman in the New Leader. “But simultaneously, he points out, Roosevelt’s supporters ‘subscribed to a civic nationalist ideal that welcomed law-abiding residents into the polity and disavowed distinctions based on race.’” Gerstle concludes American Crucible on what Jack Forman, writing in Library Journal, calls a “cautionary note, predicting either a resurgence of racial exclusivity or a watering down of national cohesion resulting from divisive multiculturalism.”
Critics found American Crucible to be a thought-provoking book. “Gerstle … has written a fresh and accessible book that fully examines this fundamental American paradox,” stated Dolman. “He has credibly, and fascinatingly, traced the odd mixture of high ideals and base doubts that shaped race and immigration policy over the last century.” “Using an impressive array of sources, from government documents to popular comics and film,” said Rachel Buff in the Journal of American Ethnic History, “Gerstle traces the arc of American liberalism from 1900 to its demise at the hands of Black militants and anti-war protesters in the late 1960s.” The historian’s “most original contribution to the existing literatures on race and nationalism is undoubtedly the importance he attributes to wars—hot and cold—and to international conflicts in sustaining, transforming, and finally reversing the racially exclusive trajectory of American nation-building,” wrote Donna R. Gabaccia in Labour/Le Travail. “Most historians of the 20th century already understand the significance of the integration of the US military in the years just after World War II, but Gerstle succeeds in placing that important policy change in broader perspective.”
In Liberty and Coercion, “Gerstle, looking at two hundred years of U.S. history,” wrote a contributor to the Princeton University Press Web site, “argues that the roots of the current crisis lie in two contrasting theories of power that the Framers inscribed in the Constitution.” “His narrative begins with the founding fathers and ends with Obama and the Tea Party,” stated Beverly Gage in the New York Times Book Review. “In between, he traces what is by now a familiar story: the growth of the federal government over more than two centuries of American nationhood. The excitement of Gerstle’s book lies in his ability to tell this story anew by homing in on the long neglected role of the states, and by staying attuned to uncertainties and contingencies of history.” The volume “illuminates a troubling paradox of American government: the Revolution and the Constitution produced both a limited central government along classical-liberal lines, and ‘miniature Leviathans’ at the state level,” explained Pierre Lemieux in Regulation. “Liberty was supposed to be protected by federalism and the Bill of Rights at the national level, and by democracy at the state level. ‘Liberty and coercion,’ he writes, ‘were bound together from the earliest days of the republic.’ He then tries to explain how, over time, the small central government crushed states’ rights and evolved into a big Leviathan.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Business History Review, winter, 1989, James R. Grossman, review of Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960, p. 950.
Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, April, 2016, R.J. Meagher, review of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, p. 1241.
Financial Times, December 11, 2015, Desmond King, review of Liberty and Coercion.
History Today, February, 1994, Mark Clapson, review of Working-class Americanism, p. 56.
Industrial and Labor Relations Review, July, 1990, Joe W. Trotter, review of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, p. 664; April, 1991, David Bensman, review of Working-class Americanism, p. 581.
Journal of American Ethnic History, spring, 2002, Rachel Buff, review of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, p. 74; fall, 2002, “The Immigration and Ethnic History Society Announces the 2002 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award.”
Labour/Le Travail, fall, 2002, Donna R. Gabaccia, review of American Crucible, p. 342.
Library Journal, June 1, 2001, Jack Forman, review of American Crucible, p. 185.
Nation, July 17, 1989, Susan Ware, review of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, p. 94; May 7, 1990, Alan Dawley, review of Working-class Americanism, p. 640.
New Leader, September 4, 1989, Terry A. Cooney, review of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, p. 18; May, 2001, Joseph Dolman, review of American Crucible, p. 28.
New York Times Book Review, January 24, 2016, Beverly Gage, review of Liberty and Coercion, p. 17.
Publishers Weekly, March 26, 2001, review of American Crucible, p. 74.
Regulation, spring, 2016, Pierre Lemieux, “Leviathan with a Human Face?,” p. 68.
Reviews in History, May, 2016, Thomas Rodgers, review of Liberty and Coercion.
Tikkun, September-October, 2005, Jane Credland, review of Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, p. 78.
Times Higher Education, January 14, 2016, Elizabeth Cobbs, review of Liberty and Coercion.
Tulsa World, March 13, 2016, Glenn C. Altschuler, review of Liberty and Coercion.
ONLINE
Cambridge University, http://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/ (March 29, 2017), author profile.
Gary Gerstle Home Page, http://www.garygerstle.com (March 29, 2017), author profile.
History since 1877, https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/ (January 24, 2015), review of American Crucible.
Out of the Tower, http://www.outofthetower-rebeccadewolf.com/ (June 12, 2014), Rebecca DeWolf, review of Working-class Americanism.
Princeton University Press, http://press.princeton.edu/ (March 29, 2017), review of Liberty and Coercion; author profile.
Professor Gary L Gerstle RHS
Paul Mellon Professor of American History
Faculty of History
West Road
Cambridge UK CB3 9EF
Email: glg34@cam.ac.uk
Office Phone: +44 1223 3 35309
Websites:
http://www.garygerstle.com/
Download as vCard
Biography:
Gary Gerstle arrived in Cambridge in 2014 after a three-decade career in the United States, most recently at Vanderbilt University where he was James G. Stahlman Professor of American History. He is currently Paul Mellon Professor of American History and Fellow of Sidney Sussex College. He is a social and political historian of the twentieth century, with substantial interests in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He received his BA from Brown University and his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Gerstle has received many fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowship, and a Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and as Visiting Professor at the Ecoles des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. In 2012-2013, Oxford elected him to the Vyvyan Harmsworth Professorship in American History. He has lectured throughout North America and Europe, and in Brazil, Israel, Japan, South Africa, and South Korea. He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2006 and named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2007. He has testified before the US Congress on immigration matters and served as an advisor and on-screen commentator for the 2013 Public Broadcasting Service documentary, Latino Americans. His writings have been translated into Arabic, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Subject groups/Research projects
American History:
Departments and Institutes
Sidney Sussex College:
Fellow
Research Interests
Gerstle’s interests are wide-ranging. He has written extensively about immigration, race, and nationality, with a particular focus on how Americans have constituted (and reconstituted) themselves as a nation and the ways in which immigration and race have disrupted and reinforced that process. He has also studied the history of American political thought, institutions, and conflicts, and maintains a longstanding interest in questions of class and class formation. The Organization of American Historians awarded Gerstle’s 2015 book, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, the 2016 Ellis W. Hawley Prize for the best book on political economy, politics, or institutions of the US since 1865. In September 2015, a Beyond the New Deal Order conference at the University of California at Santa Barbara assessed the influence of Gerstle’s 1989 coedited book, The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, on the writing of American political history. In early 2017, Princeton University Press will publish an expanded edition of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, with a new chapter exploring race and nation in the Age of Obama. In 2017, University of Pennsylvania Press will publish a sequel to the New Deal Order, entitled Beyond the New Deal Order. I am coediting this volume with Professors Nelson Lichtnstein and Alice O'Connor, both professors at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Research Supervision
Gerstle is fully-engaged with post-graduate supervision, at both the MPhil and PhD levels. Recent and current PhD students are working on a wide range of topics including: the ‘inquiring state’ in the early republic; drug policy, race, and the state in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America; Mexicans, Anglos, and violence on the Texas Borderlands during the Mexican Revolution; African American expatriates and Negritude in post-WWII Paris; sexuality and GIs in WWII France; the Mattachine Society and the roots of the gay liberation movement; the carceral state in Texas, 1945-1975; the folk music revival, 1930s-1960s; electricity, ecology, and public power in the Tennessee Valley, 1930s-1970s; white and black Protestantism and the Civil Rights movement; religious education in post-1960s America; 1960s student radicalism in the American South; community medicine programs and the Great Society; and the strange career of Tory Socialism in post-World War II America.
Teaching
For undergraduates, Gerstle lectures and supervises for Paper 24, The United States since 1865. He also supervises Part II dissertators.
Other Professional Activities
Convenor, Cambridge American History Seminar
UK Coordinator, Boston University-Princeton University-University of Cambridge workshop in American political history
Organizer, with Joel Isaac, of States of Exception in American History, a Cambridge Conference (May 2015) on emergency powers and liberal democracy in the United States, past and present, to be published as a book
Co-editor, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America, a book series published by Princeton University Press
Editorial Boards, Dissent, Journal of American Ethnic History, Journal of American Studies, and Past and Present (Past board member of the American Historical Review and the Journal of American History)
Advisor, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, on Many Voices, One Nation, an exhibit on immigration that will open in 2017
Consultant, for newspapers, magazines, bloggers, museums, and film producers on immigration, race, and politics in the United States
Commentator on politics for BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4, Good Morning Britain, BBC World New Service, New Statesman, The Nation, The Daily Telegraph, and National Public Radio (US). My website, www.garygerstle.com, offers links to most of these programmes, interviews, podcasts, and writings.
Keywords
Academic related
American History
Key Publications
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015), winner of the 2016 Hawley Prize; 2016 Editors' Choice, New York Times Book Review; Spanish translation to be published in 2017
Liberty, Equality, Power: A History of the American People (co-authored), Seventh Edition (Cengage, 2015)
Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, co-edited with Steve Fraser (Harvard, 2005)
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001), winner of 2001 Saloutos Prize, best book award given by the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. A new edition of the book will appear in 2017, with a new chapter on Race and Nation in the Age of Obama, 2000-2016.
E Pluribus Unum? Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, co-edited with John Mollenkopf (Russell Sage, 2001)
America Transformed: A History of the United States Since 1900, co-authored with Emily Rosenberg and Norman Rosenberg (Harcourt Brace, 1999)
Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge, 1989)
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, co-edited with Steve Fraser (Princeton, 1989)
Select Articles and Book Chapters
Links to many of these articles can be found on my personal webpage, which can accessed here:
http://www.gary.gerstle/
“he Age of Obama,” A new chapter for new edition of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2017)
“Foreword,” to Many Voices, One Nation: Material Culture Reflections on Race and Migration to the United States (Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, 2017), book to accompany 2017 National Museum of American History exhibit
“The Civil War and Statebuilding: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Civil War Era, forthcoming 2017
“The Reach and Limits of the Liberal Consensus,” in Robert Mason and Iwan Morgan, eds., The Liberal Consensus Reconsidered: American Politics and Society in the Postwar Era (Florida, 2017)
“Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Nationality,” in Ronald Bayor, ed., Oxford Handbook on American Immigration and Ethnicity (Oxford, 2016), 144-165
"The Contradictory Character of American Nationality: A Historical Perspective," in Nancy Foner and Patrick Simone, eds., Fear, Anxiety, and National Identity: Immigration and Belonging in North America and Western Europe (Russell Sage, 2015), 33-59
“Acquiescence or Transformation? Divergent Paths of Political Incorporation in America,” in Jennifer Hochschild, Michael Jones-Correa, Claudine Gay, and Jennifer Chattopadhyay, eds., Immigrant Political Incorporation: A Handbook (Oxford, 2013), 306-320
“Minorities, Multiculturalism, and the Presidency of George W. Bush,” in Julian Zelizer, ed., The Presidency of George W. Bush: A First Historical Assessment (Princeton, 2010), 252-281
“A State Both Strong and Weak,” American Historical Review 115 (June 2010), 779-85
“The Resilient Power of the States Across the Long Nineteenth Century: An Inquiry into a Pattern of American Governance,” Desmond King and Lawrence Jacobs, eds., The Unsustainable American State (Oxford, 2009), 61-87
“America’s Encounter with Immigrants,” in Michael Kazin, ed., In Search of Progressive America (Pennsylvania, 2008), 37-53. Published in Dutch as “Hoe Amerika omgaat met zijn immigranten: Het verleden, het heden en de toekomst,” in Frans Becker, Menno Hurenkamp, and Michael Kazin, eds., Op zoek naar progressief Amerika (Mets and Schilt, 2007), 112-127; and in French as “L’Amérique rencontre les immigrants: passé, présent, futur,” Cahiers d’histoire 108 (April-June 2009), 95-110
“Race and Nation in the Thought and Politics of Woodrow Wilson,” in John Milton Cooper, Jr., ed., Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson: Progressivism, Internationalism, War, and Peace (Woodrow Wilson Center and Johns Hopkins, 2008), 93-124
“Race and Nation in the United States, Cuba, and Mexico, 1880-1940,” in Don H. Doyle and Marco A. Pamplona, eds., Nationalism in the Americas (Georgia, 2006), 272-304; translated into Portuguese as “Raca e nacao nos Estados Unidos, Mexico e Cuba, 1880-1940,” in Nacionalismo no Novo Mundo: a formacao de estados-nacao no seculo XIX (Editora Record, 2008), 409-450
“In the Shadow of Vietnam: Liberal Nationalism and the Problem of War,” in Michael Kazin and Joseph McCartin, eds., Americanism: New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal (North Carolina, 2006), 128-152; translated into Portuguese as “Na sombra do Vietna: o nacionalismo liberal e o problema da guerra, Tempo 25 (July-December 2008), 47-74
“The Immigrant as Threat to American Security: A Historical Perspective,” in John Tirman, ed., The Maze of Fear: Security and Migration after 9/11 (New Press, 2004), 87-108; translated as “L’immigrant, une menace pour la securité américaine,” in Pietro Causarano, et al., Le XX siècle des guerres (Les Editions de l’Atelier, 2004), 256-272. Revised and updated for Elliott R. Barkan, Hasia Diner, and Alan M. Kraut, eds., From Arrival to Incorporation: Migrants to the U.S. in a Global Era (NYU, 2008), 217-245
“Diversity, Pluralism, and the War on Terror,” Dissent, 31-38, Spring 2003
“Immigration and Ethnicity in the American Century,” in Harvard Sitkoff, ed., Making Sense of the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2000), 275-95
“Theodore Roosevelt and the Divided Character of American Nationalism,” Journal of American History 86 (December 1999), 1280-1307. Anthologized in Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, eds., Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity (Duke, 2009), 163-95
“Liberty, Coercion, and the Making of Americans,” Journal of American History 84 (September 1997), 524-558. Anthologized in Charles Hirschman, Philip Kasinitz, and Josh DeWind, eds., The Handbook of International Migration: The American Experience (Russell Sage, 1999), 275-94. Translated and reprinted as “Libertad y coaccion en la conformacion de la nacion norte Americana,” in Desarrollo Económico: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 40 (July-September, 2000), 317-48
“Race and the Myth of the Liberal Consensus,” Journal of American History 82 (September 1995), 579-86
“The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” American Historical Review 99 (October 1994), 1043-1073
Gary Gerstle is an American historian and academic. He is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University, and a fellow of Sidney Sussex College.
Contents
1 Early life
2 Academic career
3 Honors
4 Books
4.1 Solely Authored Works
4.2 Co-authored and Co-edited Works
5 External links
6 References
Early life
Gary Gerstle received his BA from Brown University in 1976 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1982.
Academic career
He taught at the University of Maryland, where he was Director of the Center for Historical Studies (2000–2003) and Chair of the Department of History (2003–2006). He taught at Catholic University of America and Princeton University prior to his position at Maryland. He joined the Department of History faculty at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in 2006. In the 2012/2013 academic year, he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.[1] As of October 2014, he is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge.[2]
He is one of the nation's leading historians of race, citizenship and American nationhood.[3] A historian of the twentieth-century United States, he is particularly interested in three major areas of inquiry: 1) immigration, race, and nationality; 2) the significance of class in social and political life; 3) and social movements, popular politics, and the state. Gerstle is the author, co-author, and co-editor of six books and the author of more than thirty articles on these topics.[4]
He has served as the Annenberg Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and as a Visiting Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociale in Paris. In addition to France, he has lectured throughout the United States and in Canada, England, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa. Gerstle has also lectured widely to the general public, and is often consulted by newspaper reporters, magazine writers, and television producers on matters pertinent to his areas of historical expertise. In May 2007, Gerstle testified on questions of immigration before the Immigration Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill.[4]
He also co-edits a book series, Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America, which has published more than thirty books, many of them prizewinners.[5] He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of American History and the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review.
Honors
His book, American Crucible, received the 2001 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award for outstanding book on U. S. Immigration and Ethnic History and was named by NPR book critic, Maureen Corrigan, one of 2008's Best Books for a Transformative New Year.[6] He has received numerous fellowships, including a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, and a Membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
He was elected to the Society of American Historians in 2005 and named a Distinguished Lecturer of the Organization of American Historians in 2007.
Books
Solely Authored Works
Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914–1960 (Cambridge, 1989; 2nd edition with a new preface: Princeton, 2002)
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2001)
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015)
Co-authored and Co-edited Works
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930–1980, with Steve Fraser (Princeton, 1989)
E Pluribus Unum: Contemporary and Historical Perspectives on Immigrant Political Incorporation, with John H. Mollenkopf (Russell Sage, 2001)
Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, with Steve Fraser (Harvard, 2005)
Liberty, Equality, and Power, with John Murrin, Paul Johnson, James McPherson, Alice Fahs, Emily Rosenberg, and Norman Rosenberg (Cengage/Wadsworth, in its 6th edition, 2011)
Gary Gerstle is the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge. His many books include American Crucible and The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order (both Princeton). He lives in Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Liberty and Coercion:
The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present
Gary Gerstle
Winner of the 2016 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians
American governance is burdened by a paradox. On the one hand, Americans don't want "big government" meddling in their lives; on the other hand, they have repeatedly enlisted governmental help to impose their views regarding marriage, abortion, religion, and schooling on their neighbors. These contradictory stances on the role of public power have paralyzed policymaking and generated rancorous disputes about government’s legitimate scope. How did we reach this political impasse? Historian Gary Gerstle, looking at two hundred years of U.S. history, argues that the roots of the current crisis lie in two contrasting theories of power that the Framers inscribed in the Constitution.
One theory shaped the federal government, setting limits on its power in order to protect personal liberty. Another theory molded the states, authorizing them to go to extraordinary lengths, even to the point of violating individual rights, to advance the "good and welfare of the commonwealth." The Framers believed these theories could coexist comfortably, but conflict between the two has largely defined American history. Gerstle shows how national political leaders improvised brilliantly to stretch the power of the federal government beyond where it was meant to go—but at the cost of giving private interests and state governments too much sway over public policy. The states could be innovative, too. More impressive was their staying power. Only in the 1960s did the federal government, impelled by the Cold War and civil rights movement, definitively assert its primacy. But as the power of the central state expanded, its constitutional authority did not keep pace. Conservatives rebelled, making the battle over government’s proper dominion the defining issue of our time.
From the Revolution to the Tea Party, and the Bill of Rights to the national security state, Liberty and Coercion is a revelatory account of the making and unmaking of government in America.
Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge
Author of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government, and historian of the twentieth-century United States speaking and writing on issues of American politics, immigration, and inequality
CURRENT WORK
My seventh book, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, an interpretive history of the uses (and abuses) of public power in the United States from the Revolution to the present, is now available via Princeton University Press. An Updated Edition of American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century, with a new chapter, “Race and Nation in the Age of Obama,” is forthcoming from Princeton University Press, February 2017.
Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy
Jane Credland
20.5 (September-October 2005): p78.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2005 Duke University Press
http://tikkun.dukejournals.org/
* Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Harvard University Press, 2005
Americans are a people who have a notoriously difficult time speaking about class. When they do, they usually invoke value-laden terms like "welfare mothers," "society matrons," and "elites" as synonyms for such basic and fundamental concepts as "rich" and "poor." Given the facts that most low-in-come people never speak about themselves in such pejorative ways, and that Republicans are frequently fond of invoking the term "elite" to deride their liberal opponents, it's not hard to figure out who it is that really defines how Americans discuss economic inequality.
In Ruling America, editors Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle have gathered together a number of eye-opening articles that examine how America's elites have historically exercised control over the country's economic, social, and cultural life. Taken individually, these essays provide a wealth of historical detail and information about each privileged group.
The major strength of this anthology, however, is its brilliantly assembled structure. Set in chronological order, starting with an essay examining colonial elites, Ruling America traces the rise and fall of each group that has attempted to rule the United States against 250 years of history, political and economic struggles, and social changes. Historical periods overlap when the fall of one dominant group gives rise to another. As the exigencies of democracy bring one down, the next steps in to exercise its prerogatives and assume hegemony.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
As the text progresses, Ruling America exposes both how each new elite class differentiated itself from those that came before it, and also the common features that united elites across time. Those who lead today's corporate America and military-industrial complex have absorbed and improved the laissez-faire economic practices of the mercantile elites in the antebellum North and the millionaire businessmen of the Gilded Age.
Today, America's elites expect the government to repay them for their financial support and influence by passing legislation to protect copyrights, opening public contracts to private industry, and easing the rules that bind corporate growth and profits. The power of this anthology, with its message about the unequal distribution of power in the United States, can at times feel overwhelming. And yet, given such a wonderfully explanatory guidebook, it's clear that their power to over-determine how Americans think about class is not entirely binding. When thinking about what it's going to take to revitalize American democracy, Ruling America is absolutely essential reading.
Credland, Jane
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Credland, Jane. "Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy." Tikkun, Sept.-Oct. 2005, p. 78. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA135458597&it=r&asid=cf65ee931adb46ae7ab1fec72189ea61. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A135458597
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
Jack Forman
126.10 (June 1, 2001): p185.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton Univ. 2001. 325p. permanent paper. illus. index. ISBN 0-691-04984-X. $29.95. HIST
Beginning with an analysis of Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism and Square Deal platforms, historian Gerstle examines how the concepts of race and nation influenced U.S. history in the 20th century. He compares and contrasts "civic nationalism" (defined here as the belief in the "fundamental equality of all human beings ... their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ... and in a government legitimized by the consent of the people") with "racial nationalism" (a belief in a people bound together by "common blood, skin color, and an inherited fitness for self-government"). The author details the interplay of these conflicting ideologies as they were expressed in important historical events, movements, popular culture genres, and historical documents. He ends on a cautionary note, predicting either a resurgence of racial exclusivity or a watering down of national cohesion resulting from divisive multiculturalism. This tightly argued historical synthesis is likely to be as influential to understanding the evolution of American nationalism in the past 100 years as John Higham's Strangers in the Land (Rutgers Univ., 1988) and Hans Kohn's American Nationalism (Greenwood, o.p.) were to understanding nationalism during earlier periods of U.S. history. For most academic libraries and large and middle-sized public libraries.--Jack Forman, San Diego Mesa Coll. Lib., CA
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Forman, Jack. "American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century." Library Journal, 1 June 2001, p. 185. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA76487776&it=r&asid=809f2c7a953b875be83cad047f076fc4. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A76487776
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century
Joseph Dolman
84.3 (May 2001): p28.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 American Labor Conference on International Affairs
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century By Gary Gerstle Princeton. 325 pp. $29.95.
SO MAYBE America was never the great cultural crucible Israel Zangwill described in his 1909 play, The Melting Pot. "A fig for your feuds and vendettas!" Zangwill proclaimed in that drama. "Germans and Frenchmen, Irishmen and Englishmen, Jews and Russians--into the crucible with you all! God is making the American!"
But never mind the difficult facts. The play was a runaway success.
Why? Gary Gerstle offers a hint in his perceptive and illuminating history of racial and immigration issues in the 20th century. In truth, he explains, the playwright had articulated "a central and enduring myth about the American nation --that the United States was a divine land where individuals from every part of the world could leave behind their troubles, start life anew, and forge a proud, accomplished and unified people."
From today's jaded perspective, Zangwill's overwrought dialogue can sound almost comical. As most educated Americans understand, the United States was schizoid from the very beginning. It drafted a Constitution that countenanced African slavery--even as it fashioned a great representative democracy for (mostly) Northern European immigrants. It had a government that ruthlessly exterminated its indigenous population--even as it celebrated the fusion of a single culture from diverse new arrivals. And throughout its history America was always more comfortable beckoning white Protestants into the melting pot than Catholics, Jews, Asians, or Slavs.
Gerstle, a historian by profession, has written a fresh and accessible book that fully examines this fundamental American paradox. He has credibly, and fascinatingly, traced the odd mixture of high ideals and base doubts that shaped race and immigration policy over the last century.
Perhaps no one better embodied the impossibly ambivalent nature of these policies than Theodore Roosevelt--war hero, President, and enthusiast for the new hybrid American that immigration would build. Roosevelt was liberal in his day. He loved immigrants who came from Southern and Eastern Europe also; it didn't matter to him if the huddled masses were Catholic and Jewish. He thought a good war helped tighten the cultural bonds among ethnic groups and hastened fusion. He was certain, too, that a superior American--"the coming superman," to use Zangwill's words--would emerge from the crucible.
But Roosevelt's catechism contained two caveats.
First, he did not want the U.S. to greet all groups with open arms. Some people could never meet the requirements of American assimilation, he thought. Included in this category were African-Americans and Asians. It was nothing personal, Gerstle explains: "In fact, on numerous occasions he passionately defended the political fights of AfricanAmericans and Asians who, to his thinking, had achieved a requisite level of intellectual and moral competence. But he believed that the vast majority of nonwhites would not achieve those levels during his lifetime or several lifetimes thereafter."
Second, Roosevelt thought immigrants should repudiate their foreign ways instantly and begin the process of Americanization. "The immigrant," he said, "must learn to celebrate Washington's birthday rather than that of the Queen or the Kaiser, and the Fourth of July instead of St. Patrick's Day. Above all, the immigrant must learn to talk and think and be United States." He left no room for the slightest whiff of Old World nostalgia.
THIS BRINGS US to the heart of the dilemma. At bottom, says Gerstle, Roosevelt and his backers envisioned an America where Europeans would quickly meld into the civic culture and where blacks would play a secondary role or none at all. But simultaneously, he points out, Roosevelt's supporters "subscribed to a civic nationalist ideal that welcomed law-abiding residents into the polity and disavowed distinctions based on race."
How could the United States both genuflect to the melting pot and practice exclusion? As it turns out, by doing just that. Although the U.S. kept its melting-pot myth intact, it grew sharply more race-conscious throughout the 1920s. It reinforced barriers that separated Asians and blacks from whites. It intensified its efforts to keep Eastern and Southern Europeans from Northern Europeans. And it sought to widen the gap between natives and immigrants. Buttressed by an "edifice of race law," Gerstle declares, these essential barriers remained in place until the 1960s.
Yet a certain kind of national unity was building as well. The unfolding of the New Deal in the 1930s was accompanied by ever louder calls to end discrimination based on ethnicity and race. Meanwhile, the labor movement successfully pushed for a social safety net that included welfare benefits, unemployment insurance and old-age pensions. All of these programs helped bring Americans together.
The crosscurrents were complex. As the sense of unity grew, many immigrants felt intensified pressure to fit in with the predominant Nordic culture. In some sections within the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Gerstle notes, the top jobs always seemed to gravitate to the most Americanized members. Immigrants such as Sicilian-born Frank Capra made movies that relentlessly celebrated core American values--featuring classic Nordic heroes like Jimmy Stewart. Even tough old Communists from the 1920s began to Americanize their names.
Then came the 1960s, which blew all notions of unity into a million pieces. The basic problem was race, of course. America had run out of time.
Gerstle tells the story of the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had forced through the Civil Rights Act of 1964, felt he was entitled to a convention free from racial strife. A nasty fight would only split the party and weaken it in November. But the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party--speaking for the civil rights workers who had been risking their lives in the South as they signed up black voters--would hear no excuses. The Freedom Democrats asked for seats as the true representatives of Mississippi, and Johnson told them no.
The consequence was a tragic split of forces that were never far apart. LBJ had moved the country unimaginably beyond TR's idea of racial exclusion in a polyglot nation. But understandably the Freedom Democrats were in no mood for promises or pleas for patience.
"Atlantic City was the blow that shattered the Freedom Democrats' fragile faith in the redemptive power of the American political system," says Gerstle. Not long after that came the Black Power movement and a separatist mindset that made appeals to racial unity sound like little more than a cheap white trick. Suddenly identity politics had seized the stage, and white liberals of many backgrounds were thrown into a terrible confusion. To this day, the Democratic Party has not completely recovered from the shock.
I HAVE only one bone to pick with this excellent book. It centers on Gerstle's ultimate prediction for America's future. He does not share the idea that a new strong-but-tolerant American civic nation is within reach. "More likely," the author believes, "the future will witness either the resurgence of a strong, solidaristic and exclusionary national identity of the sort that has existed in the past, or, in the interests of tolerance and diversity, we will continue to opt for a weaker identity." He means a nation capable of generating "only thin loyalty to nationalist ideas" along with "limited ties of feeling and obligation to Americans outside our core identity group."
But why does he think this? America is more inclusive than ever. We finally seem to have found an equilibrium between yesterday's racism and the identity politics of the '60s. Assimilation still works. Just check the rates of intermarriage Asians and Hispanics have with older American groups.
At the same time, Republican politicians as diverse as New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and President George W. Bush--neither of whom is exactly an apologist for American power--have shown strong sympathies for immigrants. Republicans tried to play the issue the other way a few years ago and it exploded in their faces. They seem to have learned.
All right, maybe I have one more bone to pick with Gerstle.
He concludes American Crucible with the admonition that we should "labor to strengthen the civic component of our nationhood, even as we recognize that no special providence or manifest destiny will guide our way." That's fine.
But he continues: "To the contrary, we will continue to be what we have been--a nation among nations, struggling like many other peoples with the complexities, contradictions and burdens of our nationhood." Well, no.
We are not merely a nation among nations. From the beginning our ideals, starting with the Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, have in fact made us different. It's not that we have always honored them. Gerstle offers ample proof of that. But they have been there just the same--larger than any of us, like a giant superego--demanding that we measure up.
And guess what? Every now and then we do.
Reviewed by Joseph Dolman Editorial writer and columnist, "Newsday"
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dolman, Joseph. "American Crucible: Race and Nation in the 20th Century." The New Leader, May 2001, p. 28. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA75658517&it=r&asid=b1effafb8f02884c2a410a108548ee3c. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A75658517
AMERICAN CRUCIBLE: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
248.13 (Mar. 26, 2001): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2001 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
GARY GERSTLE. Princeton Univ., $29.95 (325p) ISBN 0-691-04984-X
Is America a wonderful melting pot in which the world's ethnicities and races can come together to form a vibrant new nation, or has the American dream become, in the words of Malcolm X, the American nightmare? The ideal of the multiracial, multicultural society has always been influenced dynamically by the competing, very potent ideal of America as a white, Protestant country. In this engrossing, powerfully argued study, Gerstle (Working-Class Americanism) shows how this struggle has shaped the past 100 years of U.S. life, society and politics. With a meticulous eye for detail, he moves deftly from quoting Theodore Roosevelt's desire for "hyphenated Americans" to become "Americans pure and simple" to a telling exegesis on how Superman comics represented a unique moment in the conceptualization of "the immigrant," specifically the Jewish immigrant, in popular culture. This ability to draw on a wide range of cultural artifacts and events--from Frank Capra films and the Rosenberg executions to the effect of the Black Power movement on African-American GIs in Vietnam--is matched by his portrayals of telling moments in U.S. history, such as when FDR's Jewish advisers urged him not to meet with a group of Orthodox rabbis who came to Washington in 1943 to ask for an end to "the destruction of European Jewry." Gerstle balances his critique of how often the U.S. has failed to live up to its melting pot ideal with a strong sense of fairness and an even stronger sense of the possibility for change. This informed and well-argued study is a strong addition to the literature on race, multiculturalism and citizenship in the U.S. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"AMERICAN CRUCIBLE: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century." Publishers Weekly, 26 Mar. 2001, p. 74. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA72520001&it=r&asid=602b3927bb7dfd8c5d2a3ad9e7b6b6e7. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A72520001
Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960
Alan Dawley
250.18 (May 7, 1990): p640.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1990 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Working-class Americanism, by Gary Gerstle, is a second attempt to break free from the paralysis of the 1980s through a study of language. Using a methodology rooted in historical materialism, Gerstle carefully grounds his study of political ideas in the evolution of twentieth-century society. Although he is one of a half-dozen scholars of twentieth-century industrial communities who follow the path laid out by social historians studying the nineteenth century, he uses the method with striking originality to tackle the thorny question of Americanism.
Known as "the most French city in America:' Woonsocket, Rhode Island, was home to a large and cohesive body of Qudbdcois immigrants who arrived in the late nineteenth century to toil in the city's burgeoning woolen mills. Stubbornly parochial, they lived in patriarchal families, were dominated by conservative Catholic clergy and were wedded to the francophone battle cry Je me souviens. They had a well-deserved reputation for being among the most quiescent workers in the land.
That makes all the more remarkable what happened in the 1930s. Weaned from the corporatist clergy by mass culture, the Quebecois grew angry when employers broke faith in the Depression. By the time of the textile general strike of 1934 they were ready to join the independent Textile Union, which would go on to become a leading force in the city for the next two decades. Like so many other ex-peasant industrial workers, they were an immovable object one day and an irresistible force the next.
The most striking thing of all is that, for a time, the French Canadians followed union leaders who were their cultural opposites. At the helm of the I.T.U. were resolutely cosmopolitan FrancoBelgian radicals, who were steeped in Enlightenment values and socialist ideals. Somehow they learned to translate their transcendent version of the new society into the American idiom of "industrial democracy," which enabled them to induct the French Canadians into the modern world of trade unions and city-wide Democratic politics.
Needless to say, Americanization from the bottom up did not sit well with Yankee-protestant elites. The last thing the Yankees wanted was for radical trade unionists to do the job of Americanization. But there was nothing they could do to stop the union from transubstantiating the most hallowed icons of American culture into symbols of class-conscious struggle. Union leaders quoted Jefferson and Lincoln on the rights of labor and counterposed American democracy to employer tyranny. A massive Labor Day parade in 1937 displayed a Liberty Bell crowned with the slogan "Liberty for all workers."
It is not hard to infer the lesson-only by speaking an American idiom could radicals become the leaven in the mass. Since the point is confirmed by the experience of Debsian Socialists and popular front Communists in dozens of places, there is nothing to quarrel with here. But Gerstle goes a step further to argue that Americanism is an open-ended set of ideas, a "contested truth:' if you will, which is susceptible to control by the left as well as by the right. This is a little harder to accept.
It is important to distinguish between Americanization as a process and Americanism as an ideology. Although Gerstle does not give enough attention to family and gender issues, no one has done a better job of telling the story of immigrant acculturation to the American environment. Americanization was the precondition for the organization of polyglot workers along class lines and for their entrance into the realm of public
Americanism is another matter. Present in some form since the Revolution, it received a great boost during World War I and then was cranked up a notch in the Red Scare to become the ideological antagonist of Bolshevism. The fact that the deck of Americanism was stacked with nativism, anti-communism, superpatriotism and a few other jokers should make one think twice about picking it up. Earl Browder's worthy effort to Americanize the Communist Party during the popular front only looked ridiculous under the slogan "Communism is the Americanism of the twentieth century." To say Americanism can mean anything you want is to enter Alice's Looking Glass.
In the end, the French Canadians of Woonsocket found the conservative version of Americanism more to their liking. In a fit of patriotic fervor at the end of World War 11 they deposed their radical union leaders. The federal government played a major role in this turnabout by pushing pluralism as the American Way. Since pluralism meant social harmony between Yankee elites and immigrant workers, and between labor and capital, it made the struggle for industrial democracy seem unpatriotic. Gerstle traces this fateful reversal in some of the most insightful pages in this unusually insightful book, but it cuts against the grain of his argument.
As Gerstle and Rodgers make clear, political renewal will have to speak the language of the American political tradition, not the Russian or the Romanian. It is also true that under certain circumstances, nationalism has played a progressive part. As an anti-imperialist force it has been on the side of liberation in dozens of cases, including the American Revolution. But in the long sweep of history it has more often been the vehicle of tribal hatred and brutal warfare and has been the inseparable companion of nation-states and national markets.
If the experience of the 1930s is any guide, organizers of the 1990s should look to popular and radical traditions as opposed to nationalistic ones. In fact, stripped of the patriotic patina, that is what working-class radicals were doing in Woonsocket and elsewhere. They translated political democracy into a demand for industrial democracy, invoked Jefferson as a universal patron of free speech and demanded "liberty for all workers," all the while drawing on the language of progressivism, populism and socialism.
That does not mean the wellsprings of tomorrow's renewal lie in yesterday's' politics. Sexual and racial equality did not figure prominently in the movements of the 1930s, yet surely they will be important in the future. We will also witness the appearance of socialism with a green face as well as environmentalism with a red face. But the beauty of both pragmatism and historical materialism is that, unlike structuralism or deconstruction, they contain the built-in ability to track the way ideas change and are changed by an evolving society.
When all is said and done, America's redemption from the Age of Mendacity will depend on popular movements willing to speak truth to power. "The words of a wise man's mouth are gracious, but the lips of a fool will swallow up himself." Ecclesiastes knew that lies can't last forever. Fortunately, these scintillating books provide valuable clues to some of the truths that might take their place.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dawley, Alan. "Working-class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960." The Nation, 7 May 1990, p. 640+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA8959039&it=r&asid=3b17b25b3cc95a9772fd1a3dabfd7d3f. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A8959039
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980
Terry A. Cooney
72.13 (Sept. 4, 1989): p18.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1989 American Labor Conference on International Affairs
The REAGAN YEARS have heightened the sense among many intellectuals that the era shaped by the New Deal has come to an end. In an effort to assess the making and unmaking of that liberal "order," Steve Fraser and Gary Gerslte have col lected 10 essays, written mostly from political, economic and Labor history perspectives. Several selections relate closely to longer studies by the same authors that have appeared or will appear and are obviously the result of considerable research. On the whole, then, this volume contains works of substance and a number of them challenge not only previous perceptions but each other.
The editors explain in their Introduction that they derived the idea of a "political order" from the concept of "electoral" or "party systems" that has been used to divide American political history into convenient blocks. They mean their term, however, to be broader, to include the examination of "economic elites, policy-making networks, and political ideologies and programs" often sighted in considerations of electoral systems.
The "New Deal order," Fraser and Gerstle argue, embodied a particular character that "decidedly shaped American political life for 40 years." Because the epoch is over, they say, their contributors are able to write with a "sober and ironic tone" distinct from both the "celebration" of the New Deal by its early liberal chroniclers and the "condemnatory terms" of 1960s radicals.
Well, not quite. Although some of the essays may represent a new stage in New Deal scholarship, others remain steeped in an outlook that is clearly "condemnatory." And although several of the authors posit a New Deal order, their arguments or assumptions about its origins and nature differ significantly.
Depending upon the piece you are reading, coalescences vital to establishing the New Deal's liberal legacy occurred in 1935, 1936 or 1937, during World War II, in 1946, or in the late 1940s. At the other end of the fine, the "old order" gave way at the beginning of the 1960s, at the close of the decade, in 1980, or perhaps has not yet gone at all.
The variations are not surprising. There is a natural tendency for scholars and political commentators to discover changes of fundamental significance in the periods they study-and, indeed, they are seldom wrong in finding at least some evidence of transition. There is also a parallel tendency, in reaching for wide generalizations, to exaggerate unities and discount or blur successive developments that might limit the boundaries of a favored notion. The difficult task is to balance an attentiveness to large- scale change with an appreciation of context and continuous process.
A few of the essays here do an exceptional job of achieving such a balance. NEchael A. Bernstein's "Why the Great Depression was Great" presents in capsule form the thesis of his recent book, The Great Depression: Delayed Recovery and Economic Change in America.
The intractable persistence of the Depression, Bernstein contends, was the consequence of an intersection between a downward business cycle and the appearance of "high-income spending behavior." As people with greater resources spent proportionately less on clothing, housing and utilities, and more on processed food, medical care, household appliances, and recreation, major estabfished industries like textiles, steel and lumber were weakened while those serving the newer forms of consumption forged ahead. When the crash came, the industries with flatter performance were unable to lead a recovery, and the more dynamic sectors of the economythough they were recovering quite rapidly- were still not large enough to revive the economy by themselves.
The thrust of the essay is signaled i its epigraph from Joseph Schumpete describing capitalism as an "evolution ary process." Bernstein gives close tention to the various patterns markig the rise or decline of particular industries as well as to their long- term implications His explanation for the duration of the Depression, made with fitnness and con viction yet without being doctrinaire, will no doubt be sharply contested over time, but it will not be ignored.
Alan Brinkley's "The New Deal and the Idea of the State" demonstrates a fine appreciation of complexity and and uncommon ability to chart conceptual change. Formulated in a country that had not decided what role the state should play, the New Deal, Brinkley tells us, was replete with ideas but lacked a central principle. By 193 7, the combination of political mistakes and economic recession made imperative the construction of a coherent liberal vision.
Two broad approaches emerged as the primary options. The first was committed to the idea of an "administrative" or "regulatory" state that would oversee the marketplace and the institutional structures of capitalism in the interest of consumers and the public. The second, looking to fiscal policy to manage the economy without institutional intervention, promised to increase consumers' purchasing power by different means.
In the late '30s the two strategies were to a certain extent compatible, thanks to the widespread assumption of a "mature" economy that did not have serious prospects for expansion. Then World War II both undercut confidence in the government's ability to administer a huge economy and stimulated an economic revival that strengthened the fiscal strategy of attending to social problems through encouraging growth. By the end of the War, sustaining prosperity was the principal goal, and the fiberal program came to be identified mainly with social welfare and with fiscal measures that required no structural change. This became the New Deal legacy.
No summary, though, can adequately capture the subtleties of Brinkley's reasoning, let alone his contextual grasp. His awareness of the changing ideas of reform, and of the shifting sense among liberals themselves about what was important in the accomplishments of the '30s, gives dimension to his effort to see the New Deal as "part of a long process of ideological adaptation, "rather than as an isolated drama.
Other contributors draw particular attention to the 1940s as a formative period, too. Nelson Lichtenstein contends that labor unions were not merely interest groups at the end of World War 11; they were organizations seeking social and institutional change that would give them a major role in industrial and govermuental planning. Only the events of the postwar period, he says, forced them to retreat"corporatism" to the narrower world of collective bargaining. Ira Katznelson, measuring change against a somewhat Procrustean standard of "social democratic potential," asserts that Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society was not a "lost opportunity" because the real opportunity had been lost in the late '40s.
The Lichtenstein and Katznelson pieces differ in fundamental ways from Steve Fraser's rather wide-ranging survey of Labor issues in the late '30s. He sees in the early positions of the CIO a dynamic of integration into a bureaucratic capitalist society and a preoccupation with security and consumption. He also paints a picture of a labor movement torn by its makeup and contradictory impulses. Lichtenstein puts forward as "Labor's Vision" a set of ideas still radical in 1946; only gradually does it become apparent that this was the vision of some leaders of some CIO unions and was generally alien to the larger AFL. Fraser emphasizes the close ties between unions and a political elite in the late '30s, and notes Labor's reliance on Roosevelt. Katznelson, on the other hand, refers to Labor in the same period as "a political opposition." These differences are hardly trivial in a volume proposing a unifying New Deal order.
Two essays offer interesting and capable discussions of opposite strains in the politics of the 1960s that tended to disrupt New Deal alliances. Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin deliver a friendly but critical assessment of the "new radicalism" with judicious comments on SDS and the differences between the Old and New Left. (One reservation: They might have reconsidered their use of the baby boom to explain the radical turn, since it was after 1964 that boomers began attending college.)
Jonathan Rieder traces in sophisticated and sensitive fashion the political rise of the "Silent Majority" and "Middle America" out of the resentments and "restorationist impulse" of various groups affronted by the upheaval of valu es in the '6 Os . Identifying th e long s tan ding fault lines of ethnicity, culture and class within the Democratic coalition that was now coming apart, Rieder shows how the term "liberal" acquired threatening connotations for many in the lower- middle and working classes. This is sociology with admirable historical instincts.
Thomas Byrnee Edsall is similarly concerned with the lower half of the population. He maintains that during the last 20 years a decline in the group's income has coincided with the growing political power of elites. His assertion that the New Deal order was associated with a "progressive redistribution of income" is a point several of the other pieces should have addressed.
The curiosity of the collection is the essay by Elaine Tyler May. She interprets the postwar celebration of family life as a construction of new values, rather than a reassertion of traditional ones. This is an intriguing and creative supposition, but it has little to do with the content of the rest of the volume, or with a New Deal framework.
Given the high quality of much of the analysis in this book, it is regettable that political posturing takes over in a few instances. When Thomas Ferguson identiies the New Deal with the emergence in 1935 of a coalition dominated by "capital-intensive industries, investment banks, and internationally oriented commercial banks," he is tenenitiously suggesting that business elites have just about the only political influence that matters. His coup de grace is a closing paragraph in which he claims to be finally unmasking a New Deal distorted by, among other phenomena, two generations of "often handsomely rewarded scholars."
If collectively these essays fail to present a consistent definition of a "New Deal order," individually most of them do offer an intelligent and informed appraisal of the processes of political and economic transformation since the 1930s. Two or three of them are indeed excellent, and that is an admirable percentage for a book of this kind.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cooney, Terry A. "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980." The New Leader, 4 Sept. 1989, p. 18+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA7966667&it=r&asid=9565c9ebfc0a45841dfed8d43f2a12e4. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A7966667
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980
Susan Ware
249.3 (July 17, 1989): p94.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1989 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
Susan Ware teaches history at New York University. She is at work on a book about popular heroines of the 1930s that focuses on Amelia Earhart.
THE RISE AND FALL OF THE NEW DEAL ORDER, 1930-1980. Edited by Steve Frayer and Gary Gerstle. Princeton University Press. 311 pp. $25.
As the twenty-first century approaches, a new generation of scholars is providing fresh historical perspectives on the twentieth. The contributors to The Rise and Fall of Me New Deal Order, 19301980 move beyond both the selfcongratulation of traditional liberals and the hostility of New Left radicals. This collection of ten essays, written mainly by scholars who came of age after the New Deal legacy had been tarnished, represents the cutting edge of historical scholarship on twentieth- century American political life.
Editors Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle offer readers a "historical autopsy" of the emergence, crystallization and decomposition of the New Deal order between 1930 and 1980. Drawing on the insights of the new political history, the authors examine underlying economic developments and social trends, not merely electoral results or particular presidential administrations, to explain the polifics of the past half-century. For example, Thomas Ferguson and Michael Bernstein resist the temptation to focus on Franklin Delano Roosevelt as the master architect of the 1930s. Instead, they explain the course of the Depression and the formation of the New Deal as the outgrowth of economic developments and shifts in the business community, especially Us realignment toward a consumerbased economy. Similarly, the decline of the New Deal order, which the authors collectively date as far back as 1960, is attributed to the interplay of economics, morality and race, not to the consequences of presidential decisionmaking.
Perhaps the greatest surprise in the collection is the emphasis on the 1940s rather than the 1930s as the formative years of modern political life. Alan Brinkley's essay on the reorientation between 1937 and 1945 of liberal ideas about the state serves as the cornerstone of the volume. In the late 1930s the New Deal floundered in ideological disorder, but by 1945 a new Keynesian consensus on the role of the state had emerged, one that continues to shape the liberal agenda. The decision to use fiscal policies to stimulate economic growth and redress social and economic imbalances allowed the state to intervene in the economy without diredly confronting the power of captialists. The expansion of economic well-being became the overarching goal for both the public and private sectors in the postwar period. Thus, the true legacy of the New Deal does not lie in the limited social welfare initiatives of the 1930s, when government spending was seen as a necessary evil in the fight against the Great Depression. It lies instead in liveralism's acceptance by the 1940s of government spending as a positive good, an ideological transformation hastened by World War II and the retum of prosperity.
Contributors Nelson Lichtenstein and Ira Katznelson similarly emphasize the 1940s as the watershed decade for recent politics. Lichtenstein identifies the period between 1946 and 1948 as a major turning point, when labor's broad vision of economic planning and redistribution ran up against (and was quashed by) the remobilization of conservative business and political forces that produced such measures as the Taft-Harley Ad of 1947. Labor leaders thereafter shifted their energies toward more privatized welfare programs. And Ira Katznelson provocafively traces the failures of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society back to the 1940s, arguing that immediate postwar political developments-including the derogation of labor to just another interest group and the substitution of mass consumption for the politics of class -sharply reduced the potential for achieving social democracy through the political process. The Great Society, therefore, self-destructed not only because of the Vietnam War but because of choices made twenty years earlier.
The other recurring theme in the collection is the centrality of race. The lurking contradiction between the welfare state's rhetorical commitment to mass consumption and to economic abundance for all, and the continuing marginalization of blacks, both economically and politically, guaranteed that the issue of race would eventually reach the center stage of national political consciousness. The strategic role played by the conservative, white- controlled Southern Democratic Party in the New Deal political coalition and the failure of the labor movement to crack open the South meant that only in response to the extraordinary political mobilization of the civil rights movement in the 1960s would the Federal government challenge the status quo. As contributors Jonathan Rieder and Thomas Byrne Edsall demonstrate in their chronicle of the consequences of the expanding Federal commitment to civil rights, few issues have been so salient in recent politics as race.
Any good collection of essays (and this is a very good one indeed) adds up to a sum greater than its parts. Still, there are lapses and omissions in this volume. Several authors overestimate the democratic possibilities of the labor movement in its heyday; black workers, for example, would scarcely have uniformly viewed unions as bastions of social democracy in the 1930s and 1940s. There is little attention paid to issues of gender and politics in this otherwise comprehensive volume. Where are such topics as the relation of feminism to liberalism, the conception of gender embedded in the welfare state and the history of the gender gap in voting? The women's movement is only briefly addressed in Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin's essay on the new radicalism of the 1960s. And Elaine Tyler May's otherwise interesting discussion of the interconnections between cold war politics and postwar domesticity fails to connect with the themes played out in the rest of the book.
The New Deal order is dead, the victim of its own internal contradictions as well as of the changing economic and social conditions of modern American life. This volume is hardly the first to announce its demise. But by offering a new generation of scholars the chance to look beyond personalities and current events in order to explore underlying social and economic themes, a richer, more thoughtful portrayal of the New Deal legacy emerges. This collection may not deliver the "startlingly new inter
Paul Mattick Jr. teaches philosophy at Adelphi University. pretations" promised by the editors, but it does raise the level of discourse in a helpful and stimulating manner.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ware, Susan. "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980." The Nation, 17 July 1989, p. 94+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA7771467&it=r&asid=ebe3dbc698f3a0ae68ec172a3f532c06. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A7771467
Gerstle, Gary. Liberty and coercion: the paradox of American government from the founding to the present
R.J. Meagher
53.8 (Apr. 2016): p1241.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Gerstle, Gary. Liberty and coercion: the paradox of American government from the founding to the present. Princeton, 2015. 452p index afp ISBN 9780691162942 cloth, $35.00; ISBN 9781400873357 ebook, contact publisher for price
53-3736
JK311
2015-2394 CIP
In this clear, wide-ranging work of political history, Gerstle (American history, Univ. of Cambridge, UK) undertakes two separate projects. The first lands the book squarely in the subfield of American political development, showing that the federal government was not built just through major transformations in response to crises, as previous scholars have argued. Instead, those seeking to expand federal power often had to work around constitutional limits through what Gerstle calls strategies of "improvisation," such as the privatization of infrastructure. A second project suggests that contemporary confusion over the proper scope of government derives in part from the founders' approval of a limited federal government coexisting with coercive powers at the state level. This latter idea, though intriguing, probably needs more attention than Gerstle provides here. Only one of ten chapters is devoted to this argument. Still, he develops considerable evidence for improvisational state building and draws out the problematic implications of relying on strategies that effectively expand federal power without the accompanying constitutional authority. Summing Up: ** Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.--R. J. Meagher, Randolph-Macon College
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Meagher, R.J. "Gerstle, Gary. Liberty and coercion: the paradox of American government from the founding to the present." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, Apr. 2016, p. 1241. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449661867&it=r&asid=1b5deb5dfea4f0a956f3fb91af394151. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A449661867
Leviathan with a human face?
Pierre Lemieux
39.1 (Spring 2016): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Cato Institute
http://www.cato.org
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government
By Gary Gerstle
472 pp.; Princeton
University Press, 2015
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
It's tempting to view American history as linear: the Founding was a great victory for individual liberty, which endured for a while but then entered a long decline up to our days. But what to make of the treatment of blacks and American Indians during the "liberty" period? And so there is an alternative linear history that sees the Founding as only a first step, with liberty growing in subsequent eras, through our still-imperfect but more glorious times. As we see in Gary Gerstle's new book Liberty and Coercion, matters are more complicated.
Gerstle, a professor of history at the University of Cambridge, traces the evolution of liberty and coercion in America. He illuminates a troubling paradox of American government: the Revolution and the Constitution produced both a limited central government along classical-liberal lines, and "miniature Leviathans" at the state level. Liberty was supposed to be protected by federalism and the Bill of Rights at the national level, and by democracy at the state level. "Liberty and coercion," he writes, "were bound together from the earliest days of the republic." He then tries to explain how, over time, the small central government crushed states' rights and evolved into a big Leviathan.
The book contains much of interest to constitutional scholars, but also to students of economics and political philosophy.
Leviathan in D.C. / The Bill of Rights constrained the federal government in how it could treat individuals. But, over James Madison's objection, its constraints were not extended to the states, an interpretation confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1833. Instead, the states held the "police power" they inherited from British law:
Under England's public police doctrine,
the king had not only the right
but also the obligation to bring order
and welfare into his kingdom.... Like
the authority that inhered in the
eighteenth-century English king, the
powers held by nineteenth-century
American states were broad, capacious,
and vaguely defined.
This police power "authorized state governments to act against anybody or any institution thought to offend public order or comity, as determined by democratic majorities," and "allowed state governments to engage in extensive regulation of the economy, society, and morality." Thomas Jefferson thought that a civic democracy of yeomen farmers would guarantee liberty at the state level; it did not work out that way.
With all their power, the states were able not only to enforce slavery in the South but also, everywhere, to control education, social welfare, family life and morality, to minutely regulate businesses, to limit free speech, to favor certain religions, and to negate due process. In 1853, for example, the overseer of the poor in Maine indefinitely committed to a work house a mother and her daughter deemed to be paupers and "living a dissolute, vagrant life"; the accused had no trial and no opportunity to defend themselves.
Widespread patronage and corruption developed, and would soon engulf the federal government too.
Much of the states' powers survived the Civil War. In the South, the states enforced apartheid. The prohibition of interracial marriages subsisted until the 1960s. Restrictions on free speech illustrated the continuing power of the miniature Leviathans. At the beginning of the 20th century, for example, a Denver editor was charged in state court with criticizing the Colorado judiciary, and his condemnation was maintained by the Supreme Court. Not until 1931 did the Supreme Court strike down a state law infringing freedom of speech.
Fortunately, state governments were not very efficient. And the exit option always existed. Some states were better than others, although Gerstle suggests only marginally.
Federal Leviathan / Contrary to the states, the central government was largely a "liberal institution in the classical sense of that term," but it had become "democratically convulsive" by the time of Jacksonian democracy. It then took more than a century for the central government to impose liberalism on the states, but the meaning of liberalism changed in the process: from defending negative liberty (the freedom to be left alone) it came to mean the promotion of positive liberty (the right to force others to serve oneself). A large federal Leviathan appropriated the states' police power and replaced the miniature Leviathans.
One step in this substitution was the ratification in 1868 of the 14th Amendment: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States ... [or] deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The amendment came to be interpreted as incorporating the federal Bill of Rights in the states' internal affairs.
The federal government gradually broke its constitutionally imposed limits in a long and convoluted process that culminated in the New Deal and, later, the "Great Society." The process largely consisted in extending the original meaning of the federal powers enumerated in the Constitution, such as regulating interstate commerce or supervising the mail. Talk about slippery slopes! The history of this usurpation, of "the creativity of a constrained central state in circumventing the formal limits on its power" is a fascinating aspect of Liberty and Coercion.
Brilliant improvisation I Usurpation? Gerstle probably does not think that way, or at least this is not how his publisher encourages readers to think about the book. According to the Princeton University Press, "In Liberty and Coercion, Gerstle shows how national political leaders improvised brilliantly to stretch the power of the federal government beyond where it was meant to go." Perhaps the "brilliantly" is just marketing talk, or perhaps it reveals something that is not so obvious in the book.
Gerstle certainly shows sympathy for the "social" Leviathan, but he is more critical of another process by which the federal government became Leviathan: through permanent wars and their national security requirements. This thread runs through the Indian wars, the Civil War, the two world wars, the Cold War, and today's boundless War on Terror. It seems that the Constitution is suspended in times of war. World War I brought the --Sedition Act (among other liberticidal legislation) under which Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party, was condemned to 10 years in jail for merely criticizing the government's decision to go to war. With the approval of the authorities, the American Protective Association organized raids to search for draft dodgers.
The 1940 Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act) was soon used to prosecute and convict American citizens charged with the crime of being Marxist-Leninists. The economic controls established during World War II greatly emboldened the dirigiste central state.
One striking point of Liberty and Coercion is how the Cold War fueled the American Leviathan. It justified the growth of the FBI and the federal surveillance apparatus. Dissidents or even non-dissidents deemed communists were harassed. The Cold War motivated the McCarthyist witch-hunt. It also justified the federal government's maintaining the large income tax base that had been imposed during World War II, including the system of tax deduction at source by employers, thus enabling the growing warfare and welfare state.
The current War on Terror is another attack upon our liberties. The U.S. response to the September 11,2001 terrorist attacks, Gerstle writes, "entailed keeping the nation on a war footing indefinitely."
Leviathan's dangers/There are a few problems with the book, which revolve around Gerstle's presumption in favor of positive liberty and his opinion that the federal Leviathan was necessary after all.
He recognizes that the distinction between negative and positive liberty marks the difference between classical liberalism and today's American "liberalism." But he does not recognize that the federal government did not need to grow into a Leviathan to impose the Bill of Rights on the states. The protection of negative liberty would not have required the monstrous federal machine that emerged after the 19th century. Fighting the Soviet "evil empire" did not require--indeed, was inconsistent with--metamorphosing American society into an evil empire with a human face. Preventing public discrimination (in southern public schools, for example)--a very laudable goal--would not have required all the power that was necessary to ban all sorts of private discrimination (in commerce, employment, etc.).
Gerstle does not see clearly what separates the public and the private. Another example: he does not seem to understand that when the state co-opts private associations or corporations to do its bidding, any resulting blame for their actions should go to the state, not to "privatization." By itself, the American way of producing public goods through voluntary associations is not to be blamed but to be lauded.
When the federal state used private cronies to build the intercontinental railroad, the problem was with government action and corruptibility, not the private interests that took the bait. The same distinction can be applied to the federal government using temperance leagues as spies and the American Protective League as an unofficial police force. Another example of the corruption of the private by the public occurred when the U.S. Department of Agriculture sponsored the American Farm Bureau Federation, which in turn, starting in the 1920s, lobbied government on behalf of farmers.
Everything is ultimately private--that is, done by individuals pursuing their own interests, outside or inside political institutions. The problem is not in the private interests, but in the frequent incapacity of social and political institutions to channel those interests toward the general welfare. When there is much to receive from government, private interests are diverted to government corruption, illegal or legal. Gerstle ignores this approach, brought to light by public choice theory during the second half of the 20th century.
He repeatedly argues that the lack of public financing for election campaigns has led to special--read "corporate"--interests buying elections and to the rise of the parties' political machines. (His history of these machines is fascinating.) But he does not mention that public financing would not solve the problem if not accompanied by limits on private financing--that is, by restrictions on free speech. And again, he does not seem to understand that so much is invested in elections because the rewards are so high and Leviathan is so rich and powerful.
Economics is not Gerstle's strong point. He speaks of "chaotic and often-ruinous capitalism." He sees employees as impotent and employers as omnipotent, as if the latter did not need the former as much as the reverse. It seems obvious to him that free markets lead to worker "exploitation" and "power differentials between capital and labor," that government is necessary to cure recessions, that "the affluence that would have come to characterize broad sections of the working class by the 1950s ... would not have taken place without central state intervention," that "the startling increases in federal government's regulatory reach brought order and prosperity to ... agriculture and labor," and that the "freeing" (he puts the term in quotation marks, perhaps not for the right reason) of finance led to the 2008-2009 recession, without even once mentioning Leviathan's housing policy. He seems to believe that the "public interest" is an easily defined and obvious goal in "managing the capitalist economy." Ac the very least, he could have mentioned that all these statements are economically very debatable. And he makes other economic blunders.
He does interpret some economic facts correctly. He observes that the New Deal's agricultural policies hurt landless agricultural workers and tenants, coming close to public choice analysis when he writes, "The case of farmers underscores how much the pursuit of government privileges by advantaged or relatively advantaged economic groups fueled the growth of government power in America, even during the headiest day of the New Deal." But he does not grasp all the implications of those observations.
Gerstle does not understand that a loving Leviathan is as dangerous as a warring one. It is true, for example, that the militarization of the police has benefited from military surpluses, but the immediate cause has been the very domestic war on drugs, which has been a war waged on U.S. consumers by a paternalistic Leviathan.
Other problems / It is difficult to disentangle Gerstle's values from his muddled economics. He is a careful scholar, but he sometimes betrays his politics. Although "reproduction rights" are mentioned, nowhere does Liberty and Coercion mention the Second Amendment, even when summarizing the rights guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. He is blind to the elaborated and detailed surveillance that has hit financial transactions since the 1970s.
He does not like laissez-faire, except in speech, sexual, and privacy matters. Perhaps he doesn't understand how liberty in personal matters and laissez-faire in "economic" matters are intimately related. Yet he himself gives a good example of this interrelation when he notes that, after the Civil War, state laws obliged railroad companies to provide segregated cars, implying that the companies might have otherwise responded to considerations of demand and cost. Protecting "social" liberties requires guaranteeing economic freedom.
Perhaps because he honestly struggles with the consequences of a good Leviathan, Gerstle is not always consistent. "Today," he writes, "the split between Democrats and Republicans about the proper scope of government constitutes a nearly unbridgeable divide." At other places he suggests more correctly that the two parties have come to embrace Leviathan. He seems to admit that the "conservative revolt" of the late 1970s and 1980s did not change much.
He rightly criticizes conservatives, who feed Leviathan with their own pet preferences for law-and-order, war-mongering, and surveillance. Strangely, however, he also states that "they are the truest of eighteenth-century liberals."
Libertarians, Gerstle admits, are more consistent: they are "no more favorably disposed to the power of the states than to that of the central government." This is true. They also view with high suspicion, if not outward contempt, the notion of "sovereignty" at whatever level. Federalism is a means--an important means but still only a means--of protecting liberty. Liberty--individual liberty in the classical liberal sense--is the ultimate value to defend in all areas of social life.
The author of Liberty and Coercion perceptively detects a paradox in today's American politics--a paradox also observable in other democratic countries. Americans want the government to get off their backs and, at the same time, to provide them with more services and privileges. In Gerstle's perspective, the solution to the paradox would be for citizens to come to terms with the necessary burden of Leviathan and enjoy life with the positive liberty that government gives them. But this is an illusion. Even without waging foreign wars, even when smiling, Leviathan is dangerous.
In his book The State (Liberty Fund, 1985, 1998), Anthony de Jasay developed a model of government that is more realistic than Gerstle's good Leviathan. The more the state intervenes, de Jasay argues, the more individuals will feel its burden, and the more they will ask for compensating privileges. If government subsidizes corporations, why shouldn't the laborers ask the same benevolent institution to protect their jobs and salaries? If race and religion are protected against private discrimination, why shouldn't injunctions be imposed for the benefit of other groups? Political parties (even if they were, in an ideal Gerstlian world, financed by all taxpayers) will compete to answer these many and conflicting demands. As Leviathan grows, everyone wants more compensating privileges and everyone is less and less happy with government's performance.
The result, de Jasay suggests, will be the Plantation State, where the state owns everything and everyone, becomes the source of all happiness, and totally controls its unhappy and ungrateful subjects. A good Leviathan does not exist.
On this sort of larger issue, Liberty and Coercion is silent. In a sense, this is understandable because it is a history book--and a very good history book at that. But Gerstle does more than history. He proposes or suggests justifications for liberty and coercion in America. And he tends to assume d la Hobbes that Leviathan is necessary to protect liberty. His Leviathan with a human face is, however, neither feasible nor desirable.
At this juncture, he may point to a sentence in his last chapter: "America still has its Leviathan, but in domestic matters, it is an institution besieged." How is that? As Gerstle himself writes in the book's conclusion, "The federal government grew from a small institution with limited powers into a Leviathan with influence across numerous areas of American life." And "numerous areas" must be an understatement.
Any lover of individual liberty must be happy that some negative liberties--free speech, interracial marriage, sexual preferences, and some procedural rights--have gradually become better protected over the past century or so. I would add that, in the last decade or so, the right to keep and bear arms has also been better recognized and protected, although some state governments still resist.
Leviathan that gives can also take away. If Gerstle were more conscious of the danger of Leviathan, he would agree that the only way to preserve both federalism and states' rights on the one hand, and the promises of liberty in the Bill of Right on the other, is to return to a classical-liberal or libertarian conception of liberty.
PIERRE LEMIEUX is an economist affiliated with the Department of Management Sciences of the Universite du Quebec en Outaouais. His latest book is Who Needs Jobs? Spreading Poverty or Increasing Welfare (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Lemieux, Pierre. "Leviathan with a human face?" Regulation, vol. 39, no. 1, 2016, p. 68+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA456479624&it=r&asid=fd9d7caec3333b9a0a9ae931fe25ac1b. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A456479624
The immigration and ethnic history society announces the 2002 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award
22.1 (Fall 2002):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Illinois Press
http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
The Immigration and Ethnic History Society presented the 2001 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award in American Immigration History to Gary Gerstle for his book American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press) at its meeting in Washington, D.C. in April 2002. The annual award of $1,000 was established in memory of Professor Theodore Saloutos, distinguished historian and first president of the Immigration History Society, by Mrs. Florence Saloutos.
The 2002 award will be presented for the book judged best on any aspect of the immigration history of the United States. "Immigration history" is defined as the history of the movement of peoples from other countries to the United States, of the repatriation movements of immigrants, and of the consequences of these migrations, both for the United States and the countries of origin. To be eligible for the award, a book must be copyrighted "2002," must be based on substantial primary research, and must present a major new scholarly interpretation. A book may be nominated by its author, the publisher, a member of the prize committee, or a member of the Society. Inquiries and nominations should be submitted to the chair of the Saloutos Prize Committee, Professor Matthew Jacobson, American Studies Department, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06520-8236. Copies of the book must be received by the three members of the committee by December 31, 2002. Send books to Professor Jacobson at the above address as well as to Professor Alison Games, Department of History, Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. 20057 and Professor Judy Yung, Asian American Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064. The 2002 award will be presented at the annual dinner meeting of the Society in 2003.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The immigration and ethnic history society announces the 2002 Theodore Saloutos Memorial Book Award." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 22, no. 1, 2002. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA403785837&it=r&asid=a4090c64d937ae551974d83c3745a5e4. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A403785837
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus)
Donna R. Gabaccia
(Fall 2002): p342.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 Canadian Committee on Labour History
http://www.mun.ca/cclh/
Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001)
GARY GERSTLE,s American Crucible is a fine and accessibly written study of race and nationalism in the United States after 1890. I hope readers will not begin by reading its back cover, however, where endorsers could raise their expectations to unrealistically high levels. Gerstle's intention was to write a work of synthesis, and he fully acknowledges his many debts to those whose ideas he has borrowed and, in some important ways, transformed. His book can be recommended to students and to specialists alike and can be read with considerable pleasure for its many insights. But can a work of synthesis ever provide the bold, original, imaginative, provocative, and rare interpretations that Gerstle's endorsers promise readers?
Civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism are well-worn terms in the US; we teach them every semester to beginning students in our western civilization and world history courses. They are terms familiar to most Americanists, too, and have become the foundation for extensive, if sometimes specialized, literatures on nationalism, race, and ethnicity. That Americans in the US have long prided themselves on their "American Creed" of inclusion and equality -- civic nationalism -- is no new insight. For twenty years and more, specialists on African Americans have also argued that the White Americans extolling civic nationalism -- whether in the 1790s or the 1890s -- were also simultaneously, and consciously, excluding from the American nation those with darker skins.
Rather than confirm the historical predominance of ethnic or civic nationalism, Gerstle's main contribution to this literature -- and it is a major one -- is his examination of the ever-shifting tensions and connections between civic nationalism and a variant of ethnic nationalism that he calls racial nationalism. Gerstle most effectively explores racial nationalism, and its tension with civic nationalism, in the lives of the great men and the great thinkers who provided political and intellectual leadership for the US in the 20th century. Thus, rather than bring the history of politics and the state into social and cultural historical analysis, Gerstle instead imports the insights of social and cultural historians into analysis of the state and the history of the country's governing elite Especially in the first four chapters of the book, we watch the interplay of conflicting national ideals in the lives of Theodore Roosevelt, American legislators, leaders of political movements, and Franklin Roosevelt. In t hese chapters, readers will gain a much clearer understanding of the apparent anomaly of advocates of the American creed tolerating, and in some cases, extending, exclusion based on skin color in a wide variety of policies regulating immigration, schooling, labour, and military service.
As a synthesizer, Gerstle also draws on the scholarship of cultural and social historians of labour, immigration, and African Americans. And he adds some original analysis of national themes in selected Hollywood films, mainly dealing with combat, as well. In his account, the US labour movement appears as an active participant in linking race and nation through the 1930s and 1940s. As one would expect from a scholar who has focused on working-class Americanism in the middle years of the century, Gerstle's account of the emergence of what he rather inelegantly calls the "Rooseveltian nation" is a useful analysis of the interaction of class, racial, and national concerns. Thereafter, however, the labour movement slips from view in his account, perhaps because it no longer represents the excluded as it had in earlier decades. It is largely replaced in Gerstle's portrait of the postwar era by the Civil Rights Movement. It was activists in this movement who focused the nation s attention on those contradictions o f racial exclusion and civic nationalism that had survived in New Deal liberalism.
Finally, Gerstle's most original contribution to the existing literatures on race and nationalism is undoubtedly the importance he attributes to wars -- hot and cold -- and to international conflicts in sustaining, transforming, and finally reversing the racially exclusive trajectory of American nation-building. Most historians of the 20th century already understand the significance of the integration of the US military in the years just after World War II, but Gerstle succeeds in placing that important policy change in broader perspective by beginning his book with careful attention to the racial dynamics of Theodore Roosevelt's Rough Riders and by extending his analysis of race and nation to the Cold War Army of volunteers and of draftees later sent to Vietnam. Ironically, according to Gerstle, the Vietnam War left many Americans unwilling to embrace civic nationalism wholeheartedly even as the country abandoned racial discrimination after 1965. His analysis of this controversial war, that pitted White Ame ricans against Asian combatants, is key to both his critique of multiculturalism and his pessimism about reviving civic nationalism by freeing it from its long association with racial exclusion. Gerstle's final chapter and epilogue, where he discusses these issues, will surely provoke debate among specialists and students alike.
Having joined many others in offering high praise to American Crucible, let me also, however, note several reservations about it. A scholar as intent as Gerstle on tracing the evolving linkages of racial and civic nationalism certainly should have alerted his readers to the significance of the periodization he chose for his book. Why does his history of the 20th century begin in 1890? As important as it was to the beginning of the US ascent to international power in that decade, ideas about and policies toward racial exclusion had arguably gone through earlier, and potentially more wrenching, transformations with the emancipation of slaves, the reconstruction of the nation, and the publications of Charles Darwin a few decades earlier. Sometimes, too, Gerstle's common-sense usage of terms proves confusing. He assumes too readily that readers grasp his own vision of the complex relationships among nation, nation-building, nationalism, and national identity. Yet theoreticians have often differed sharply among t hemselves in analyzing those linkages and most readers would benefit from more guidance. Observers have long disagreed over whether Americans even constitute a nation -- let alone a "Rooseveltian" one. And what Gerstle calls "racial nationalism" seems sometimes an attribute of the nation or a dimension of national individual identity rather than an evolving political ideology comparable to liberalism or civic nationalism.
Finally Gerstle himself acknowledges in a footnote that his decision to explore racial nationalism rather than Rogers M. Smith's "ascriptive Americanism" (fn 8, 377) limited his ability to treat nationalism as a gendered concept. His attention to warfare, combat, and international conflicts as important forgers of nations is welcome, for it portrays men as gendered beings. Still, it also leaves readers with few clues as to how women found (or failed to find) inclusion in the nation. I would note further that by substituting "racial nationalism" for the more commonly used "ethnic nationalism" Gerstle foreclosed fruitful avenues of cultural analysis that would have reinforced his critique of multiculturalism. Civic nationalism is only one of a number of cultural values that are broadly enough shared by Americans, of all races, to distinguish them as a nation from Canadians, Mexicans, or Europeans. Among these other values are an intense commitment to individualism, an attachment to the English language, and exp ectations of religious faith (and expressions of religious fervor) that makes atheists -- not Blacks, Jews, or women -- the least attractive national leaders most Americans can imagine. As an unapologetic advocate of civic nationalism, Gerstle's limited treatment of these elements of ethnic, American nationalism forces him to cede unnecessary ground to the multiculturalist vision of an American nation that too often denies the existence of shared values such as these.
Gabaccia, Donna R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gabaccia, Donna R. "American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. (Reviews/Comptes Rendus)." Labour/Le Travail, 2002, p. 342+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA97822496&it=r&asid=a93115ad8992d2b90cf7d21026ceab74. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A97822496
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century
Rachel Buff
21.3 (Spring 2002): p74.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2002 University of Illinois Press
http://www.iehs.org/journal.html
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. By Gary Gerstle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. xv + 454 pp. Illustrations, notes and index. $29.95 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).
This is a well-written and well-researched book with some deep flaws. Gerstle's central argument, about the entwined nature of "racial" and "civic" nationalisms in American life, offers some dazzling analysis of what he calls "the Rooseveltian Nation": the assimilation-fired crucible forged by Theodore and then Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Using an impressive array of sources, from government documents to popular comics and film, Gerstle traces the arc of American liberalism from 1900 to its demise at the hands of Black militants and anti-war protesters in the late 1960s.
Particularly useful to Journal of American Ethnic History readers is Gerstle's brilliant treatment of Theodore Roosevelt's racial thought as it pertained to the movement for immigration restriction in the early twentieth century. For Gerstle, both restriction and Americanization campaigns were sites for an enduring consolidation of "the disciplinary state." (For example, he traces Martin Dies' lineage as heir to the Progressive tradition of racial nationalism through his and his father's support of immigration restriction and Dies conviction that immigrants were to blame for the Depression.) Using this insight, he convincingly links Roosevelt's ambivalent embrace of racial nationalism to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's seemingly more inclusive New Deal liberalism, which was always less than effective in providing African Americans access to political and economic enfranchisement. Gerstle uses the ideals of Theodore Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" to describe the high points as well as the great racial lacunae of American liberalism.
Also of use to ethnic and immigration historians is Gerstle's treatment of the impact of war and the military on ideas of national cohesion. This is not a novel concept. But Gerstle's historical sweep, beginning with the Rough Riders of the Spanish-American War and continuing through Vietnam and even Ronald Reagan's hetoes of Grenada, provides insight into the importance of the military as a socializing institution, able to integrate as well as exclude racial and ethnic groups. He does a particularly nice job on "the military's hidden race war," as segregated troops during World War II engaged in a racially charged conflict in the Pacific arena.
But in this "crucible of war" argument, Gerstle goes too far. Despite other indications, such as the African American March on Washington movement and resistance in Japanese American internment camps, he asserts that minority groups were swept up in mainstream nationalist enthusiasm during the 1940s. This indicates problems in Gerstle's predominantly consensus approach.
The book draws too sparingly on the history of ethnic minorities themselves. So, for example, while Gerstle invokes the biographies of many liberal politicians and organizations extensively, there is no mention of Adam Clayton Power, Sr. or Jr., at all. We do not hear about ethnic organizations, such as the Japanese American Citizens League, or the National Congress of American Indians. As a result, it is difficult to evaluate the motives that Gerstle imputes to minority actors. The great military accomplishments of the 442nd regiment of Japanese Americans, for example, were certainly driven by more than simple patriotism, as was the Black "Double V' campaign. Failing to historicize such complex motivations, and lacking a necessary immersion in ethnic history, Gerstle underestimates the obstacles to inclusion within even the civic nationalist tradition.
This contradiction becomes more pronounced as the book progresses into the postwar period. While Gerstle can celebrate the civic nationalism of pacifist A.J. Muste, arguing that his "Declaration of the Rights of Workers and Farmers" paraphrased the Declaration of Independence, he dismisses the Black Panthers as anti-American, missing the fact that they cite the same document in their 1966 Platform, "What We Want/What We Believe."
As a result, causation becomes skewed. Concurrent events, including the arrival of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party at the 1964 Democratic Convention and the decline of the Democratic liberal consensus, are portrayed as causal. By the conclusion, Gerstle is arguing that liberal programs, such as affirmative action, have recently been responsible for the demise of civic nationalism. In a book that contains no consideration of the incessant undermining of the Civil Rights movement since 1954, this is certainly giving up on the American promise far too easily!
Rachel Buff
Bowling Green State University
Buff, Rachel
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Buff, Rachel. "American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century." Journal of American Ethnic History, vol. 21, no. 3, 2002, p. 74+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA403785917&it=r&asid=7da74e22f3740a1d23cdc830ac51e399. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A403785917
Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960
Mark Clapson
44.2 (Feb. 1994): p56.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1994 History Today Ltd.
http://www.historytoday.com/about-us
The theme of the organised yet ethnically diverse American working class in the twentieth century, and its integration into an embracing American consciousness, is the subject of Gary Gerstle's Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City 1914-1960 (Cambridge University Press, $12.95). This is a thoroughly researched and convincing discussion of labour politics and radicalism in Rhode Island, its struggle to become part of what 'Americanism' meant, and its adaptation to liberal progressivism, a process helped along by the influence of antiCommunism and the material compensations of American society. Unlike Stead, Gerstle enables the reader to see the union boss, depicted as corrupt or comical in American and British films of the 1950s, in a more sympathetic light: their aggression or devious tactics were often the best way to overcome powerful and intransigent managements, and many were motivated by a strong view that economic relations were moral relations, which should give labour its fair dues.
Gerstle's final point is to remind us of the significance of this union past: labour solidarities and 'tightly bonded communities' were central to the development of an Americanism which now threatens to forget this element of its history. A similar point can be made of the hollow commitment to a classless Britain, about which we hear so much today.
Perhaps this is symptomatic of a wider mid-Atlantic amnesia about those older class values and practices so sympathetically explored by McKibbin and Gerstle, but the changes and continuities in which require a closer connection with the present than is now offered by contemporary history.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Clapson, Mark. "Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960." History Today, vol. 44, no. 2, 1994, p. 56. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA14822236&it=r&asid=e54f7104c0fb34d3c9d5181322137c5e. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A14822236
Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960
David Bensman
44.3 (Apr. 1991): p581.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1991 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.sagepub.com
Working-Class Americanisms: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-60
In the hands of a less-skille dhistorian, the story of labor's efforts to organize the textile industry in Woonsocket, Rhode Island wuld be nomore than a curiosity. Woonsocket was, after all, a minor mill town; its primary product, wool worsted, was not a great industry; its work force, dominated by French Canadians, was quite unlike that of most major industrial centeres; and its primary labor union, the Independent Textile Union, never affiliated with the major federations.
But Gary Gerstle transforms Woonsocket's story into a compelling investigation of the sources of the vitality and limitations of American labor in the twentieth century. By paying serious attention to the culture and, above all, the language used by Woonsocket workers and trade unionists, Gerstle brings into sharp focus a drama played out in hundreds of industrial towns in Depression-era America: while radical union leaders were trying to mold a desperate and angry work force into a European-style labor movement, those same conservative ethnic workers were trying to move toward equality in their relationship not only with management but also with the dominant culture.
In the late nineteenth century, Woonsocket was a quite textile town with a quiescent work force composed primarily of French Canadians concerned with maintaining their ethnic and religious integrity. When French and Belgian wool manufacturers established woolen mills in Woonsocket early in the twentieth century, they brought with them skilled textile workers steeped in the traditions of the French and Belgian labor movements. In the 1920s and 1930s, these two groups, united by language but divided by culture, began a slow and fateful dance.
Joseph Schmetz, who came to Woonsocket via the socialist labor movement of Belgium, began to dream of organizing a social democratic labor movement, complete with schools, credit unions, recreational clubs, labor unions, and a political party, in his adopted community in the 1920s, but it was only when the local textile industry foundered amidst the Great Depression that he had an opportunity to realize his dreams. By 1934, Schmetz and fellow immigrant workers had succeeded in organizing the Independent Trade Union of Woonsocket, which quickly gained collective bargaining rights in most of the city's mills and extended its reach to local and state politics by asserting the power of workers agaist the Irish-dominated local machine, and against the state's political establishment as well.
To legitimate his dream for workers' power, Schmetz, with the aid of Lawrence Spitz, a Popular Front radical from outside Woonsocket, tried to create a language of working-class Americanism, which incorporated his social democratic vision into a version of American culture that stressed democracy, progress, and nationalism. But Schmetz found himself challenged by French Canadian workers who did not share his vision. Gerstle brilliantly traces how the French Canadian traditionalists, with the aid of some Catholic priests, created their own, coporatist, version of working-class Americanism.
The anti-radical forces ultimately won the struggle for the control of the ITU. They kept their union out of the CIO, abandoned non-textile locals, and withdrew from independent political action. In the 1940s, as wartime patriotism and postwar anti-communism grew ascendant, and an era of cultural pluralism seemed to legitimate Woonsocket ethnics' cultural aspirations, the ITU leaders' copratist vision lost its aggressiveness. Meanwhile, the ITU's fortunes sank with the northern textile industry.
It is instructive to contrast Gerstle's study with another major recent account of the organization of industrial workers in the 1930s--Daniel Nelson's study of the American Rubber Workers. Nelson's study tells us much more about the employers' efforts to resist organization and minimize union power, and it has far more solid documentation, both of the dynamics of union formation and of the evolution of collectve bargaining. Yet, Nelson's study is weakest just where Gerstle's is strogest; Nelson can describe but not explain the opposition to the United Rubber Workers in Akron, whereas Gerstle's grounding of the ITU story in the cultural history of the French Canadian and Franco-Belgian communities enables him to analyze fine nuances in the political developments of the 1930s and 1940s.
Gerstle's use of oral history is also noteworthy. Althoug the written records are silent, Gerstle's interviews uncovered the existence of an organized cadre of workers, tied to a local Catholic labor school, who banded together to oppose Schmetz's social democratic vision. Since the anti-Schmetz faction ultimately gained power and created their own version of working-class Americanism, Gerstle's discovery is of more than passing interest.
For all of my enthusiasm about this book, I do have reservations about the centrality Gerstle gives to his analysis of language. There's no doubt that the difference between the radical and conservative versions of working-class Americanism reflected real cultural differences within Woonsocket's labor movement, but Gerstle argues more than that; indeed, he argues that the language choices workers made played a major role in determining the outcome of the power struggles of the postwar era. This overemphasis on the importance of language detracts from Gerstle's analysis of the social forces that limited the development of postwar American labor. Nevetheless, this is a thoutful, well-crafted, and important book.
David Bensman
Associate Professor Labor Education Department, Institute of Management and Labor Relations Rutgers University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bensman, David. "Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960." Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Apr. 1991, p. 581+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA10623006&it=r&asid=7f6fe4837d3bad7c0c6205bbebce0593. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A10623006
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order
Stephen Amberg
65.1 (Spring 1991): p190.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1991 Business History Review
The New Deal and the generation of political and economic stability that it ushered in continue to be a mine for lessons about the useful if not unproblematic role of government in economic development and for debates about the constitution of the American political economy. This collection of ten essays provides a "historical autopsy" on the "elites, programs and ideologies" (pp. ix-xi) that characterized the New Deal Democratic party and, indeed, American national government policy into the 1970s. The volume seems to reflect a post-modern perspective attentive to the "missed opportunities, unintended consequences and dangerous but inescapable compromises" of the era (p. x). Despite these appearances, the editors' basic explanation for the rise and fall of the New Deal order is the development of the forces of production and the attendant problems of adjustment for the social and political organization of society. As such this volume is part of a neo-Gramscian Marxism that competes with the institutionalism associated with Theda Skocpol and the flexible specialization perspective argued by Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin.
Not all of the essays closely follow the framework laid out in the introductory chapter by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle, but the book starts with two pieces, by Thomas Ferguson and Michael A. Bernstein, that underline its basic premises. Ferguson and Bernstein argue that the keys to New Deal reform and the explanation for the length of the 1930s' Depression can be found in analyses of the rise and decline of industrial sectors. Ferguson argues that a new "historic bloc" of forces emerged in the U. S. economy by the 1920s, based on capital-intensive manufacturing and on internationally oriented commercial and investment banking, that supported free trade, international monetary coordination, and progressive labor management. In the 1930s leaders from these sectors coalesced with major retailers and northeastern textile and shoe firms behind a Democratic president to gain some of the benchmark achievements of the early New Deal, such as the Glass-Steagall Act, the Social Security Act, the National Labor Relations Act, the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, and federal deficit spending.
Because the essay is an abridgement of an earlier article, the argument that cycles of industry development determine political outcomes is not clearly made. Still, one has only to note the exceptions that Ferguson points out, such as the chemical industry and the textile firms, to ask whether the real issue is competitive strategies rather than the technological qualities of industry. Ferguson himself equivocates on whether General Electric and Standard Oil supported the Wagner Act (p. 20). And the automobile industry also does not easily fit the framework. Bernstein's essay suggests that the composition of the political coalition is not really critical; if not for the "random" forces of financial collapse and war, he claims, the economy would still have made the transition to mass consumption (p. 46). Ferguson's work should, however, dispel once and for all the myth that the New Deal Democratic party was a "labor party" that was hostile to "business."
Essays by Steve Fraser and Alan Brinkley on the ideological commitments of the new Democratic coalition explain the Franklin Roosevelt administration's specific brand of liberalism. Fraser discusses the sudden evaporation from public affairs in the late 1930s of the "labor question": what the role of workers at work and in society should be in a democracy with large-scale manufacturing. As other writers have done, Fraser argues that much of the labor policy reforms of the New Deal were presaged during the first two decades of the century. But Fraser goes further. He argues that the New Deal coalition had its roots in pre-New Deal liberal experiments in industrial relations and that "the CIO [Congress of Industrial Organizations] already existed as an embryonic strategic alliance, its incipient leadership already integrated, via the left wing of the scientific management movement, into the political circles around [Felix] Frankfurter and [Louis] Brandeis" (p. 62). This new elite-which included U.S. senators and consumer-oriented industry as well as union leaders like Sidney Hillman and John L. Lewis--got its political chance during the 1930s with the political emergence of "second generation" immigrant workers in mass production manufacturing and with ideological shifts in historical oppositional politics away from "anti-monopolism." Then it was possible to put into place a powerful "proto-Keynesian" coalition that paralleled and supported the "ineluctable" process of "industrial rationalization" (p. 64). Ironically, then, just as the union movement was reaching its historical peak in political influence, the labor question was transformed from a class to a consumer issue, as management of the economy in the public interest became a responsibility of the democratic state (p. 70).
Fraser, unlike revisionist labor historians, judges that the close strategic alliance and "collaboration" between the new labor movement and large-scale industry was no "betrayal" of workers' interests (p. 77). On the contrary--and here he undermines much of the value of his analysis--the New Deal coalition was only the outcome to be expected from the "presumptive momentum of complex, bureaucratic organization, the imperatives of corporate-led economic stability and growth, and the increasing power of the mass market and mass production to dissolve the ties of social solidarity" (p. 78).
Brinkley's argument is far less bound than the preceding chapters by the alleged logic of sectoral demands; at the same time, he also finds part of the significance of New Deal liberalism in how political leaders transformed earlier concerns about the problems of industrial society when they were faced with renewed depression in late 1937. The new ideology was associated with Thomas Corcoran, James Landis, and Thurman Arnold (whose record Brinkley re-evaluates), among others, and he finds that the new liberalism combined two elements. The first was regulatory: the worst features of large-scale capitalism--its threat to the public interest in improving standards of living and market fairness--could be tamed by government regulation and, therefore, historical anti-monopolism could be dropped, as could the old alternative of an associational capitalism. The second and "more important" element was that liberals found that many of their goals could be achieved by "compensatory" policies, such as fiscal stimulation of mass consumption and counter-cyclical social welfare, without trying to justify interventionary sectoral programs. The conduct of the national economy during the Second World War was evidence to liberals of the wisdom of the new creed that planning could be dangerous while macroeconomic policy could sustain economic growth.
Although Brinkley implies that the liberal creed was formed by the end of the Second World War, Nelson Lichtenstein and Ira Katznelson correctly point out that the new liberals had to contend with continuing support within the Democratic party for a more interventionary strategy of economic management. In particular, as some of us have been arguing, during the postwar 1940s the debates over government policy resumed, and the CIO unions represented a force for some sort of democratized industry planning. The dominant wing of the CIO favored industry councils" and, in the version advanced by the United Auto Workers, a national planning board as well. Lichtenstein is right to locate these reforms in the context of ongoing industrial and political party conditions. After the unions suffered a series of political defeats of attempts to press a program of full employment and universal entitlements, they increasingly sought to negotiate compensatory benefits directly from employers.
Like Brinkley, Katznelson does not conceive of politics as a determinant outcome of the socioeconomic structure of society. Indeed, the narrowed postwar liberalism that leaned on neo-Keynsian analysis and interest group politics redefined the possibilities for reform during the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson administrations (pp. 186-87) and helps to explain the achievements and limitations of the Great Society. Katznelson argues that although the Great Society "revived some of the social democratic impulses of the New Deal and Fair Deal" (p. 197), by which he means further compensatory policies to help workers compete in the market or otherwise mitigate the distributional consequences of markets (p. 198), the Great Society programs were conceived by technicians as solutions to marginal problems of a political economy that was otherwise very satisfactory (p. 202). Poverty, as Theodore Lowi wrote in The End o Liberalism (1969), was defined as a "special interest," and programs were targeted at poor blacks in the central cities. That, however, made the programs and the Democratic party vulnerable to charges of elitism and insufficient commitment to the public interest.
The New Deal order also, the editors suggest, established the social base--semi-skilled factory workers and "organization men"--for a modernist transformation of community and family life focused on mass consumption and privatism. However, the essays that discuss mass culture do not clearly establish this homology, and Jonathan Rieder's careful essay about the importance of race in the collapse of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s reinforces Katznelson's point that forms of politics and policy can have an impact on how individuals conceive their interests pp. 265-66).
The final essay by Thomas Byrne Edsall argues that the consequences of the crumbling of the New Deal Democratic party for who gets what from government have been stark. The tax burden and the distribution of income shifted in the 1970s and 1980s to favor the wealthy, and Edsall assigns the responsibility for these shifts to post-New Deal Democrats and Republicans alike. The post-New Dealers arose from suburban districts with service industry voters and were abetted by a new elite of campaign managers and money men, as well as by the weakening of organized labor as a consequence of the decline of domestic manufacturing. In short, the social and economic bases of the Democratic party changed, quite apart from anything the Republicans were doing, and it is these changes--apparently autonomous from politics--that promise "the long run ... maintenance of a strong, conservative Republican party" (p. 286).
Stephen Amberg is assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas, San Antonio. He is the author of "Democratic Producerism: Enlisting American Politics for Workplace Flexibility," Economy and Society (1990). Currently he is preparing a book for publication entitled "Beyond the New Deal Labor System: The Democrats, the Unions and the Liberal Industrial Order," and he is working on a study of skill development in the American automobile industry.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Amberg, Stephen. "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order." Business History Review, vol. 65, no. 1, 1991, p. 190+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA12372929&it=r&asid=18159c742c5df63c6c67e9a3a7722b81. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A12372929
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980
Joe W. Trotter
43.5 (July 1990): p664-665.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1990 Sage Publications, Inc.
http://www.sagepub.com
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980
Edited by Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order is a splendid collection of ten essays documenting changes in American political and social life from the early 1930s through the 1970s. In a succinct, but thoughtful, introduction the authors place the essays within broader historiographical, methodological, and theoretical contexts. Drawing on recent theoretical developments in political science and the "new political history," the book analyzes "the emergence, crystallization, and decomposition" of the New Deal "political order," defined as the "dominance of the Democratic party and its liberal agenda" from the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 through the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
By building on the insights of the new political science and history, the book offers interdisciplinary perspectives on the New Deal legacy; advances our knowledge beyond the conflicting historiographical traditions spawned by the partisan debates of the 1930s on the one hand and the radical reassessments of the 1960s on the other; and, most important, deemphasizes the impact of specific political actors like FDR and the regular sequence of national, state, and local elections. In short, this study links changes in twentieth-century American political life to "crises in the nation's economy, social structure, and political culture".
Although the book is the product of 12 different authors (including the editors) writing on various facets of the rise and fall of the New Deal order, a series of interlocking questions and answers holds this study together. In Part I ("The New Deal Order: Emergence and Crystallization, 1929-1960"), Thomas Ferguson, Michael A. Bernstein, Steve Fraser, Alan Brinkley, Nelson Lichtenstein, and Elain Tyler May explore why the Great Depression lasted so long; how the Democratic party could accommodate poor workers and wealthy elites within the same coalition; and why the "labor question" lost its saliency in American politics at the same time that industrial workers obtained growing political influence through their labor organizations. In documenting and explaining the socioeconomic and political contours of the New Deal order, in varying degrees the authors emphasize the primacy of a growing new elite, specializing in the production of new consumer goods; the growing role of the state in economic development, particularly through the use of fiscal rather than regulatory power; and the increasing focus of the labor movement on collective bargaining, emphasizing job security and participation in a mass-consumption ethos. The precise timing, character, and causes of the triumph of the New Deal order, however, are not entirely clear, partly because of different definitions of Keynesian economics--so-called "regulatory Keynesianism" (Fraser) and "fiscal Keynesianism" (Brinkley)--a central attribute of the era.
On the other hand, in Part 2 ("The New Deal Political Order: Decline and Fall, 1960-1980"), Ira Katznelson, Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, Jonathan Reider, and Thomas Byrne Edsall analyze how the focus of liberals in American society shifted from class inequality in the 1930s to racial inequality in the 1960s; why an expanding consumer economy precipitated political and cultural conservatism in the 1950s, but radicalism in the 1960s; and how the Democratic coalition lost its staunchest constituents during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unfortunately, however, the study does not include an essay documenting the precise interplay of race and class during the Civil Rights era. This omission is a mystery, given the centrality of race and class in the overall conceptualization of the book and given the detailed essays on a variety of white race-specific issues: white radicalism in the 1960s (Isserman and Kazin), the white "silent majority" (Reider), and the essentially white "family in postwar America" (Tyler May).
Such criticism aside, however, this collection warrants close attention. It offers a variety of useful insights into the rise, maturation, and fall of the recent liberal political order in American society.
Joe W. Trotter Associate Professor Carnegie Mellon University
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Trotter, Joe W. "The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order: 1930-1980." Industrial and Labor Relations Review, July 1990, pp. 664-665. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA8615218&it=r&asid=aa7f2ffb8303ac9a58bda395208dcf08. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A8615218
Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960
James R. Grossman
63.4 (Winter 1989): p950.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1989 Business History Review
Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 During the 1930s in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, conservative, deeply religious French Canadians joined with Franco-Belgian immigrants steeped in Marxian socialism to build "the most powerful of New England's textile unions" (p. xi). One group was "premodern," communalist, Catholic, and wedded to a culture defined by la survivance--"the perpetuation of French Canadian faith, language, and manners" (p. 25). The other was scular, anticlerical, rationalist, and confident of "the liberating possibilities of modern, industrial society" (p. 70). A core of French-Canadian skilled mulespinners provided the link, but where was the common ground? One might look first to language--all spoke French in Anglophone New England--but the French-speaking mill management and ethnic elite commanded loyalty as well. Not until outside forces weakened the ties of French Canadian workers to their ethnic leadership was class unity possible; until then each group lived in an "ethnic bubble," isolated from one another and to a considerable extent from the outside world. Franco-Belgians struck "recklessly," a tactic more appropriate to northern France than to New England. French Canadians never struck until 1927, deferred to priests who "chose" to reject the modern world and to ignore Rerun Novarum, and constructed a virtually hermetic Quebecois community life. The two groups did not speak the same language at all. Indeed, they inhabited two different stages of history, with the preindustrial French Canadians unlikely to understand the Belgians' radical and modern Marxian language of class.
It would be language, however, that the two groups of workers would share, but a very different kind of language--what Gary Gerstle calls "the language of Americanism." This language emerged out of the crucible of employer Americanization programs, First World War nativism, and the assault of mass culture in the 1920s. Its four dimensions--nationalist, democratic, progressive, and traditionalist--could combine in different ways and serve different purposes, depending on who was mobilizing the language in what political interest. The democratic dimension, for example, expressed the ideals associated with the heroes and icons that formed the nationalist dimension. These ideals could include liberty, democracy, pluralism, freedom, or equality, thereby plausibly apotheosizing individualistic capitalism and the sovereignty of private property as easily as democratic egalitarianism or industrial democracy. Even industrial democracy could sanction either company unions or variants of socialism and militant industrial unionism. By 1930, anyone contesting for power in the United States had to compete on this linguistic terrain. Politics had become "the battle for control of the language of Americanism" (p. 3).]
What brought together the small cadre of Belgian radicals and the masses of French Canadian traditionalists was a "working-class Americanism" fashioned by radicals who had come to recognize the alien nature of Marxism and the impracticality of "reckless militancy" (p. 90) in an American context. They adapted Marxian socialism to a syncretic discourse that drew on American political culture to legitimize unionism, industrial democracy, and working-class political activism.
While the Belgian radicals were learning how to legitimize a political role for workers as a class, the material experience of French Canadian textile workers was teaching the reality of class. In some segments of the industry, jobs, wages, and hours became increasingly susceptible to the vagaries of the international market during the 1920s. In other segments incomes boomed, and the cornucopia of available consumer products opened new cultural vistas to strategically situated skilled French Canadian mulespinners. When the Depression hit, French Canadians reacted within the context of their ethnic world view and associated their poverty with a sense of marginality as dis-dained ethnics in a Yankee world. With their communalism providing a basis for mobilization, they sought a means of inclusion into the mainstream.
Becasue absentee mill owners had not tried to Americanize their work force and the ethnic leadership remainedd committed to the reactionary ideology of la survivance, these French Canadians were especially open to an Americanism defined by the Belgian radicals. They joined Woonsocket's Independent Textile Union (ITU) in the early 1930s not only because of its potential to help them recover incomes and assure their traditional status as breadwinners, but also because the union promised a route out of the cultural isolation with which they now associated their proverty. "They wanted to learn English . . . and gain for themselves the rights and entitlements of American citizens" (p. 12). They remained French Canadians in their religion (despite initial clerical opposition to unionization), their communalism, and their cultural orientation. But they were organizing as a class, into a union whose rhetoric eschewed the iconography and antimodern tendencies of French Canadian culture in favor of the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers, and the language of democracy and progress.
The ITU's formula of couching an ideology of working-class empowerment andd industrial democracy within Americanist language was successful but unstable. The viability of this "working-class Americanism" during the 1930s and the Second World War depended not only on the recovery and then vitality of the industry, but also on support from the state. The National Industrial Recovery Act and then the Wagner Act legittimized both unionization itsefl and the language of industrial democracy that was central to the Americanization of Belgian socialism. During the war, however, "an aggresively ideological wartime state" (p. 310) privileged production over industrial relations and transformed the language of Americanism into cultural pluralism and subsequently anti-communism. The concern of New Deal liberalism with the "labor question" and the definition of industrial democracy gave way to a liberalism focused on cultural pluralism and "the brotherhood of man." Working-class radicals found themselves relegated to the margins of a political discourse whose ground had shifted such that even the liberal position now focused on racial prejudice and discrimination rather than on the dynamics of class.
In this ideological climate many French Canadian workers responded readily to clerically supported attempts to emphasize traditionalist "corporatist," rather than "progressive," opposition to capitalist exploitation. The mutuality of relations between capitalist and worker replaced a vision of industrial democracy oriented toward empowering the worker at the expense of the employer. In a pluralist world, everyone could be joined in brotherhood; industrial democracy meant not confrontation but cooperation. Soon anti-capitalist traditionalism grounded in "communalist" values would give way to a traditionalism defined by conservative associations of family and religion with anti-communism and patriotism. The union lost its edge, andd when the textile industry declined in the 1950s, the ITU could do little to protect its members, who now found themselves with no jobs, no source of political power, and a watered-down ethnicity that had sacrificedd communal values for liberal individualism.
Americanism had facilitated the organization of Woonsocket's working class and provided the linguistic tools for an empowering ideological independence. At the same time the malleability of a shared language left labor "susceptible to cooptation and containment" (p. 331), because the symbolic universe of Americanist political culture was as amenable to anti-communism and cultural pluralism as it was to industrial democracy and communalism. To regain thee initiative of the 1930s, the American Left would have to relearn and recapture the language of Americanism.
The complexity and originality of Gerstle's argument complements his creative use of an eclectic array of sources. Logically organized and clearly written, Working-Class Americanism draws us into the world of Woonsocket's French Canadian and Franco-Belgian working class. But the opposition never emerges from the shadows of that world. Gerstle's sympathies are clear; this is the story of a "grand struggle for freedom and independence" (p. 1), but the contours of that struggle might be a little clearer if we knew more about the industrialists and the ethnic middle class. One of the book's strengths lies in is unusually clear formulation of the relationship between ethnicity, class formation, industrial relations, the labor movement, the state, and political cultur. The analysis of that relationship, however, suffers from an imbalance between the depth of understanding of an occasionally romanticized working-class world and the more stereotyped and belatedly introducedd forces that were central to its fate.
These limitations, especially problematic in the context of business history, are to an extent artifacts of Gerstle's admirable respect for and appreciation of the perspective of his protagonists. Rather than casting blame on union leaders, Communists, or New Dealers for blunting rank-and-file militancy, he acknowledges the depth of conservative tendencies among workers and other Americans and asks "what made an alliance of different working-class constituencies possible?" (p. 125). The answer lies in the relationship between political culture and class formation, and Gerstle's ability to tease out the complexities of that relationship is due partly to his willingness to listen to his subjects and accept their world on their terms.
James R. Grossman is director of the Family and Community History Center at the Newberry Library. He is the author of Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (1989). His current research focuses on urban politics in the early twentieth century.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grossman, James R. "Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960." Business History Review, vol. 63, no. 4, 1989, p. 950+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA10619830&it=r&asid=fd58c67742b45c825f2516133d8131fb. Accessed 12 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A10619830
‘Liberty and Coercion,’ by Gary Gerstle
By BEVERLY GAGEJAN. 22, 2016
Continue reading the main story
Share This Page
Share
Tweet
Pin
Email
More
Save
Photo
Credit Matt Chase
Between 1913 and 1920, Americans amended the federal Constitution four times. Each amendment solidified a major reform: the direct election of senators, the first federal income tax, votes for women, the banning of alcohol nationwide. Taken together, they reflected the progressive view that the Constitution was a living document, able to be adapted to and updated for the nation’s needs. A century ago, most Americans seemed to agree that new circumstances required new tools, and that the federal government would have a key role to play in meeting the challenges of the modern age.
As the historian Gary Gerstle points out, this sense of possibility — the hope that the federal government will rise to meet its historical moment — has been all but lost in our era of partisan sniping, Washington gridlock and the “party of no.” How we got into this mess is the subject of Gerstle’s terrific, engaging and deeply analytical new book, “Liberty and Coercion,” which offers an ambitious reinterpretation of American political history from the founding to the present. Gerstle does not blame one set of bad actors for our current predicament (though he evinces little fondness for the modern Republican Party). Rather, he notes that the United States has always been a nation of competing political traditions, in which hostility to federal power has existed side by side with vast ambitions for what the federal government might do.
One of our finest political historians, Gerstle aims for chronological sweep rather than a deep archival dive. His narrative begins with the founding fathers and ends with Obama and the Tea Party. In between, he traces what is by now a familiar story: the growth of the federal government over more than two centuries of American nationhood. The excitement of Gerstle’s book lies in his ability to tell this story anew by homing in on the long neglected role of the states, and by staying attuned to uncertainties and contingencies of history. “Liberty and Coercion” is no Whiggish tale of triumph. Gerstle argues instead that American political development happened in fits and starts, and that compromise, evasion and accommodation make up their own venerable political tradition.
Gerstle’s title hints at his central argument that at least two competing strains of governance have long coexisted in the United States. As we learn in high school, the nation was founded as a federalist republic, with the power of the central government constrained by the Bill of Rights. But the individual states, Gerstle notes, exercised a stunning level of coercive power from the beginning, with the right to create and enforce laws on everything from marriage to human slavery. What happened in American history, Gerstle argues, is not simply that “government” began to play a greater role in citizens’ lives over time, but that the power to legislate and declaim on such matters shifted increasingly from the state to the federal level. Gerstle’s aim, to paraphrase the political scientist Theda Skocpol, is to “bring the states back in” to this larger narrative of federal transformation.
Continue reading the main story
Easier said than done, as Gerstle notes. For entirely practical reasons, historians have been loath to examine the states; after all, there are 50 “dreary state archives” to visit if one is to do the job well. Gerstle himself rejects the 50-state approach, jumping lightly from illustrative case to illustrative case without suggesting that he has tapped out every possibility. Some of the most fascinating chapters come early on, as Gerstle describes the tension between Lockean liberalism at the federal level and the far more coercive reality on the ground in any given state. Early Supreme Court decisions, he writes, concluded that the Bill of Rights simply did not apply at the state level. The Constitution did, however, severely limit the administrative and political capacities of federal leaders.
Book Review Newsletter
Sign up to receive a preview of each Sunday’s Book Review, delivered to your inbox every Friday.
Receive occasional updates and special offers for The New York Times's products and services.
See Sample Privacy Policy
Gerstle shows a healthy appreciation, even admiration, for the ways that early politicians sought to get around these limits. Andrew Jackson emerges as a model of making do with less, managing the nearly impossible task of securing territorial sovereignty while commanding a ragtag volunteer army prone to desertion. As the author of an excellent book on American racial politics, Gerstle is hardly blind to the racialized violence inherent in Jackson’s military campaigns. He nonetheless admires Jackson’s creativity and ability to wage effective war in a nation that wanted big things but refused to support a standing army.
By the time the book enters the 20th century, stories about creative and heroic individuals such as Jackson tend to give way to chronicles of undifferentiated sprawl at the federal level. Certainly in the postwar years, the federal government poses the same research problem presented by the states: There are so many agencies, so many bureaucrats and politicians, that one can hardly study them all. In Gerstle’s narration, the central government itself emerges (perhaps unintentionally) as a semi-personified individual, exhibiting “courage,” “ambitions” and even “confidence” on its path to power. Gerstle nonetheless maintains his appreciation for individual men and women who managed to achieve big things — good or bad — by accommodating longstanding constitutional constraints. At the F.B.I., J. Edgar Hoover deployed a newly potent logic of “national security” to justify unprecedented domestic surveillance. At the White House, Lyndon Johnson relied on an overstretched interstate-commerce clause to secure federal supremacy in civil rights. In both cases, vast new powers emerged by tweaking and evading the existing system, not by changing its fundamental structure.
Gerstle does not hesitate to note what a weird way this is to run a government, and how different the United States remains on this front from the rest of the world. In that sense, this book runs against the “transnational” vogue within the historical profession, which emphasizes connections and continuities beyond national borders. Though it is hardly a celebratory work, “Liberty and Coercion” embraces a certain kind of old-fashioned American exceptionalism. For better or worse, Gerstle argues, the United States is not much like other nations when it comes to some basic mechanisms of governance.
Gerstle’s sensitivity to the odd features of the American system may be heightened by his recent move to Britain, where he now teaches American history at the University of Cambridge. Gerstle worries that our cobbled-together way of doing business may not prove sustainable in the 21st century, when Congress seems incapable of keeping the government operating day to day, much less tackling major issues such as climate change and economic inequality.
Gerstle concludes by urging Americans to take up the progressives’ favorite tool: amending the Constitution. He does not hold out much hope that this will yield immediate changes. “Instead,” he writes, “it will open up an ideological space that allows a belief in a living constitution to take root and grow.”
Without that space, he suggests, Americans are in danger of becoming locked in “the split between Democrats and Republicans about the proper scope of government.” As Gerstle reminds us, both parties represent viable if competing traditions within American political history. But there is a third, even more powerful tradition: muddling through. However difficult it may be, the parties have no choice but to find a way forward. To give up now would be positively un-American.
LIBERTY AND COERCION
The Paradox of American Government From the Founding to the Present
By Gary Gerstle
452 pp. Princeton University Press. $35.
Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale, is writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover.
A version of this review appears in print on January 24, 2016, on Page BR17 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: A Check on Balance
My Perspective on American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century by Gary Gerstle
American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century by Gary Gerstle, is not just a typical survey of American history; upon first reading the title the reader may believe that it is. However, as one begins to become entrenched in the reading, it becomes clear that the focus of the writing is Theodore Roosevelt and how his philosophy reflects on society and history. Gerstle also examines how Teddy Roosevelt’s philosophy was conflicted or strengthened through different periods in American history. Gerstle’s take on American history can easily sway the reader because, after reading the book, it is difficult to think about American history in the same way.
Theodore Roosevelt was a man who thought highly of the pioneer spirit and the romantic idea of the Kentucky backwoodsmen; there was an American Creed that embodied this spirit in Roosevelt’s mind, and that creed was who would succeed in America[1]. Roosevelt’s notion was reflected in American history and Gerstle effectively shows how this notion was imbedded into society by comparing different points in history to the Rooseveltian philosophy.
While Gerstle is able to convey his point, one might point out that he may give too much credit to Roosevelt and the Rooseveltian notion being imbedded and reflected in American history. There are many other individuals who believed in the same way. Why were they not the fathers of this type of thought? Why did history not revolve around their philosophies? There is no doubt that Roosevelt was influential, but his influence is limited just like many another figures in American history.
When Gerstle begins to discuss the collapse of the Rooseveltian nation, he discusses different literature, productions, and movements that contributed to the fall. One film he discusses is The Godfather. When one looks at the picture below, the quote comes into mind, “I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse.” [2] Many people watch The Godfather and see it as an interesting story about the rise and fall of the Sicilian mafia. While I am a major fan of the movie, I have never considered the movie a product of the time and a celebration of the Italian ethnicity that was exhibited through dinners, weddings, and gatherings. In addition, I have not thought about the greediness exhibited in the film as a reflection of American society and government. Gerstle did well making this point and his analysis makes perfect sense.
Godfather
Although there may have been some weaknesses in the book, the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. Gary Gerstle effectively makes his point and provides evidence to back up his claims. It was a good read and is recommended to anyone interested in a different perspective of American history from 1890-2000.
Bibliography
[1] Gerstle, Gary. American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
[2]The Godfather. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Performed by Marlon Brando. 1972.
Posted on January 24, 2015Author rickydale
High quality global journalism requires investment. Please share this article with others using the link below, do not cut & paste the article. See our T&Cs and Copyright Policy for more detail. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights.
https://www.ft.com/content/07783e24-9e8e-11e5-8ce1-f6219b685d74
‘Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present’, by Gary Gerstle
Tea Party activists at a rally on the grounds of the Capitol in Washington DC in 2013
Share on Twitter (opens new window)
Share on Facebook (opens new window)
Share on LinkedIn (opens new window)
2
Print this page
December 11, 2015
by: Review by Desmond King
They are “the nine most terrifying words in the English language”, according to Ronald Reagan: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.” That was in 1986, but it is a fear that persists among Reagan’s would-be Republican successors today. Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and other presidential hopefuls have all attacked “big government” as part of their campaigns.
Sample the FT’s top stories for a week
You select the topic, we deliver the news.
Select topic
Enter email address
Invalid email
By signing up you confirm that you have read and agree to the terms and conditions, cookie policy and privacy policy.
Supported by a succession of Republican speakers, most recently John Boehner and Paul Ryan, lawmakers are prepared to pay a high price in pursuit of this belief — and of its corollary, that the rights of individual states are paramount. This is especially true of those congressmen and -women affiliated to the Tea Party. Rather than increase central government spending, they are prepared to endure shutdowns of federal offices and public facilities, as the rest of the world looks on askance.
As Gary Gerstle, Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge, demonstrates in his absorbing study Liberty and Coercion, such friction is built into the constitution — or at least is a consequence of how America’s founders designed it. The book is a riposte to scholars who overestimate the durability of today’s inflated federal government, a reminder that it arose through the peculiar historical circumstances of the New Deal and the cold war. Although greater centralisation of power may be necessary to counter threats from without — from Japan, the Soviet Union and, latterly, jihadi terrorism — it is always subject to challenge because of the way states’ rights are enshrined in the constitution.
At the four-month assembly which created that constitution — the 1787 Philadelphia Convention — the states’ representatives accepted the need for a federal government that would be capable of defending Americans against enemies. But the delegates were also animated by fear of an overweening national government. To appease this anxiety, the Bill of Rights, comprising 10 amendments to the constitution, was added to protect the individual citizen. Among other things, this enshrined the right to free speech, habeas corpus and the right to bear arms, and it directly reserves many powers to the states. Yet for all its eloquence in asserting the rights of individuals, James Madison’s proposal that the Bill be incorporated into each state’s constitution was scuttled, and early judicial decisions exempted states from its provisions.
These decisions led to what Gerstle sees as the great paradox of American government: the federal government and the states were organised according to distinct principles. The federal government represented liberalism, epitomised in the Bill of Rights’ elevation of individual protection from the state. The states gained “police power”, a doctrine drawn from the ideas of the English jurist William Blackstone. As the Massachusetts Supreme Court chief justice Lemuel Shaw declared in 1852, this doctrine empowered state politicians to enact “wholesome and reasonable laws, statutes, and ordinances . . . as they shall judge to be for the good and welfare of the commonwealth”. The “public welfare” was rated above private rights; state laws about such topics as religion, race, marriage, prostitution and temperance followed.
Americans’ autonomy relative to the federal government coexisted with their subjection to rigorous state laws. “The liberal doctrine of governance enshrined in the national Bill of Rights did eventually defeat the illiberal doctrine that animated politics in the states,” Gerstle writes. “Until that moment of conquest, America was neither liberal nor illiberal. Instead — and paradoxically — it was both. A polity that promised individuals great freedom also encased them in systems of coercion.” Despite federal victory in the civil war, the exemptions accorded to individual states were reinstated by the Supreme Court in the 1870s and 1880s as de jure and de facto racial segregation replaced slavery.
Gerstle identifies several reasons why the states’ power persisted for so long. Some had to do with the weakness of federal structures. The young nation’s army was voluntary and, outside wartime, too small to sustain a federal presence within remote areas — to be deployed, say, against treaty-breaking settlers occupying Indian land in the 19th century. And it was not until the second world war that the government secured a buoyant income tax base.
Also crucial was the rapid and ubiquitous rise of parties and electioneering in US politics. Elections and campaigns were doggedly local, controlled by often corrupt party bosses and awash with enough money to guarantee an “unlimited supply of roast ox for the multitude”, as weekly magazine the Nation put it in the late 19th century. Progressive reformers eventually won a secret ballot, but the need for candidates to elicit mountainous campaign contributions is undiminished.
The second world war prompted a rebalancing in finances that tilted power away from the states
The Supreme Court, too, played a part. Appointed by presidents, justices mostly proved timid in the face of states’ rights. Gerstle views the court as an agency within the national government that was in effect captured by the states; liberal judicial activism in the 1950s and 1960s was the exception.
Gerstle describes the constitution as oblique “on the slavery question”, and the leeway that allowed was critical in states’ decisions to ratify it. Racial equality was one of the most intractable points of contention between the states and the federal government. Employing the “incorporation” principle, from 1931 the Supreme Court steadily required states to respect liberties mandated in the Bill of Rights. Their resistance meant that each right required a separate judicial struggle, with the Court becoming ever more steely. Were it not for the cold war, Gerstle argues, the federal government might have lacked the necessary strength to back civil rights: it gave “the central state the confidence to take on the states”.
Money mattered hugely to reform. The second world war and cold war brought about a rebalancing in finances that tilted power away from the states. In 1938, the states’ revenues made up 60 per cent of total government revenues; by 1948, that figure had fallen to 30 per cent, as federal income taxation became more important. The result, says Gerstle, was to put the federal government “in the driver’s seat of social policy, with the states shunted to the backseat, and more and more compelled to go along for the ride.” The 1965 education reform act enabled Lyndon Johnson to use a “strings attached” strategy — threatening to withhold new funds — to impose school desegregation in the South.
Liberty and Coercion is a towering achievement, bristling with stimulating arguments and historical erudition. Gerstle persuasively defends his thesis that the states matter more than many historians have supposed in shaping the modern US. Indeed, it has been increasingly clear since Reagan’s day that federal expansion is not a one-way highway. It was Reagan who ended the seemingly inexorable rise in tax rates in 1981, a reversal confirmed by Newt Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract with America”. The states’ rights doctrine has influential fans too, including the current chief justice, John Roberts. In a 2012 judgment on the Affordable Care Act, he observed that states stand as “independent sovereigns in our federal system”. The great American dialectic is still playing out.
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, by Gary Gerstle, Princeton, RRP£24.95/RRP$35, 464 pages
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, by Gary Gerstle
Elizabeth Cobbs on an enlightening and alarming study of how the central state has had to fight for its legitimacy
January 14, 2016
Share on twitter
Share on facebook
Share on linkedin
By Elizabeth Cobbs
Men pouring alcohol down drain during prohibition
We’ll have none of that here: many states passed temperance laws. A few allowed as much sinning as a man could stand
It might startle readers in the UK, safeguarded by a Bill of Rights since 1689, that its US equivalent protected almost nobody for much of American history.
Gary Gerstle’s complex book shines a light down countless twisted alleyways and switchbacks of America’s past, but none reveals the paradoxes of federalism like the crooked path of the Bill of Rights.
The first amendments to the Constitution define privileges that the federal government may never abridge, such as free speech. They were an afterthought to a plan so controversial that the states nearly rejected it. New York ratified the Constitution by only three votes.
Anti-federalists did not go away. They retired to the states, which retained extraordinary police powers. In fact, the Bill of Rights limited only the federal government’s power to abuse individuals. Since Americans lived in states, few could call upon federal protection in everyday life.
At the outset, James Madison, the “father of the Constitution”, proposed that states ought to be bound to the national Bill of Rights, but his colleagues in the House of Representatives did not agree. The states liked their sovereignty.
Except in matters of defence, tariffs and interstate commerce, they operated autonomously. Half of them permitted chattel slavery until 1865. Some enfranchised women early; most did not. Many passed temperance laws banning alcohol, tobacco and prostitution. A few allowed as much sinning as a man could stand.
The Civil War shifted the balance of power by eliciting the Fourteenth Amendment to protect former slaves. It prohibited states from making “any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens”. Suddenly, local law had to match federal law, although Washington lacked the gumption to enforce the amendment.
Government remained weak in other arenas as well. As Gerstle deftly shows, this resulted in creative workarounds to adapt 18th-century procedure to evolving norms. Want to stop the circulation of birth control, legal in some states in 1875? Call it a violation of national postal codes. Change your mind and want states to permit birth control in 1965? Call it the constitutional right to privacy.
Gerstle discusses, but could highlight more, the final judo move that broke the states’ hold: the creation of a standing army during the Cold War to provide security for allies. This shifted the tax base from the states to Washington, whose influence and largesse grew accordingly. Federal reformers used their new strength to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment (and the Bill of Rights), sparking opposition from conservatives angered by assaults on traditional folkways, such as separate washrooms for “the colored”.
Ronald Reagan led the movement to restore states’ rights. Ever since, those favouring federal power have struggled with increasingly bitter complaints that it exceeds “the limits intended by the founders”. Ironically, conservatives’ goal of defunding Washington is hamstrung by their own commitment to world policing.
And so government descends into paralysis: as Gerstle observes, “in no other industrialized country has the central state been forced to fight for its legitimacy as doggedly”.
Gerstle ultimately challenges Americans to do that which most cannot fathom: revise the Constitution. He may as well ask a goldfish to play fetch. As he shows, citizens will abide any absurdity rather than monkey with the one thing that has united them since 1789 – except during the Civil War.
Liberty and Coercion is not a strong “how-to” book. It is more: an enlightening, alarming analysis that shows how a government forced to “rely on a mix of strategies to get its work done” incrementally altered the landscape of US history like a blind but determined river.
Elizabeth Cobbs is professor of history, Texas A&M University, and author of American Umpire (2013).
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present
By Gary Gerstle
Princeton University Press, 472pp, £24.95
ISBN 9780691162942 and 9781400873357 (e-book)
Published 25 November 2015
Book Review: Gary Gerstle’s Working-Class Americanism (1989)
June 12, 2014 by Rebecca DeWolf
The Power of Americanism
How should we understand the labor movements of the mid-twentieth century? Were they ultimately radical or conservative in nature? In Working-Class Americanism, Gary Gerstle looks at how progressive working-class leaders in Woonsocket, Rhode Island were more pragmatic than radical while their traditionalist counterparts were more innovative than conservative.[1] By presenting a community study with a close analysis of political language, Gerstle illuminates the conception of Americanism, underscores the diversity in mid-twentieth century labor unions, and demonstrates the transformative ideological nature of the 1940s. In the end, Gerstle’s work raises significant questions about the construction of political language.
With a chronological framework, Gerstle first discusses how the two major working-class groups in the Woonsocket community (the traditionalist French Canadians and progressive Franco-Belgians) emerged from their insular ethnic worlds of the 1920s. Gerstle then calls attention to how these groups united to form the Independent Textile Union (ITU) in the 1930s. Finally, Gerstle explains that by the 1940s “working-class Americanism” had moved away from its initial goal of democratizing relations between capital and labor; to this end, working-class Americanism increasingly came to focus on the discrediting of communism and the elimination of racial and religious bigotry. Gerstle ultimately emphasizes how two groups of twentieth-century workers formed their class identity around progressive and traditional ideals.
At the heart of Gerstle’s study is the resilient and elastic notion of “Americanism.” For Gerstle, the language of Americanism is best understood in four overlapping dimensions: nationalist, democratic, progressive, and traditionalist. In Gerstle’s view, social groups need to channel the language of what it means to be an American in order to gain political and economic power. “The substance of American politics,” Gerstle contends, “changed dramatically over time as different groups gained and then loss control of the language of Americanism.”[2] In sum, Gerstle concludes that the malleability of Americanism enhances the ability to not only unite but also mobilize people across political, cultural, and moral divides. [3]
For Gerstle, the language of Americanism provided an “ideological and linguistic unity” for the working-class groups of Woonsocket.[4] As Gerstle explains, working-class leaders, like the Franco-Belgian radical Joseph Schmetz, rallied textile workers by urging them to claim their rights as American citizens, as the Founding Fathers had done before them.[5] As well, Gerstle shows how the ITU’s rise to power also relied upon the French-Canadian skilled workers (the mulespinners) who rallied support among the masses of French-Canadian textile workers by using Americanism to emphasize ethnic communalism.[6] Thus, radical leaders expressed their progressive views through a language of Americanism that also promoted traditional values. Overall, Gerstle argues that the language of Americanism united the pragmatic radicalism of the Franco-Belgians and the corporatist values of the French Canadians.
In Gerstle’s analysis, the dominant meaning behind Americanism alters from period to period. To this point, he contends that by the 1940s an ideological transformation had occurred that redefined the concept of Americanism. Previously, the language of Americanism facilitated the partnership between progressive and ethnic impulses by stressing the democratization of the workplace and the rights of all workers. During World War II, in contrast, political leaders refashioned the concept of Americanism in order to defeat progressive and ethnic impulses; as a result, they increasingly stressed the pluralistic nature of American culture and industry. This notion of Americanism—pluralism—recognized a diversity of legitimate interests in the world and, consequently, it displaced the conflict between labor and capital as a central issue by refocusing attention towards the evils of religious and racial bigotry.[7] Anticommunism also became central to Americanism at this time as working-class groups stressed cooperation, rather than class struggle as a central goal. [8]
Most importantly, Gerstle challenges a school of historical interpretation that became popular in the 1970s.[9] This earlier historical narrative maintains that uniform radical working-class groups created the new industrial unions of the 1930s. In contrast, Gerstle insists that the role of French-Canadian skilled workers in the ITU demonstrates a “stratum of workers with the ability and desire to forge links between constituencies that had little in common.”[10] In short, Gerstle underscores the diversity of the ITU to highlight the dual commitment to unionism and ethnic heritage that shaped the Depression-era labor movement.
Gerstle also rethinks the conventional periodization of the 1940s. Typically, historians understand the 1940s as a continuation of the New Deal reform impulse.[11] Yet, Gerstle disagrees with this assessment. For example, Gerstle arrests that “the union experience in 1940s Woonsocket was in several ways discontinuous with that of the 1930s.” [12] Most of all, Gerstle suggests that by the 1940s liberalism itself had changed in an essential way. Through an examination of government propaganda, Gerstle argues that the Roosevelt administration shifted the focus of Americanism from the rights of workers to eradicating religious and racial bigotry. Furthermore, as Gerstle concludes, this shift to pluralism signified an effort to capture the loyalty of ethnic and racial groups during World War II.[13]
Gerstle challenges classic historical interpretations while shedding light on the concept of Americanism and its ability to change over time. However, his study is not flawless. For instance, Gerstle suggests that the driving force behind the workers of Woonsocket is their French-Canadian or Franco-Belgian background. This reductionist method tends to overlook individual agency. In addition, while Gerstle utilizes a variety of sources (interviews with ITU members, ITU newsletters, and the union archive), his focus is on working-class leaders, such as Joseph Schmetz and Lawrence Spitz. Consequently, his study obscures the experiences of everyday workers.
Even so, Gerstle’s study presents an important analysis on the power of Americanism and it impact on the labor movements of the mid-twentieth century. Yet, the significance of Gerstle’s study stems from the implicit questions that he leaves unresolved: Is political language solely constructed by leaders and then passively received by followers? In other words, are the constructions of political conceptions trickle-down processes? Or, perhaps, political language is constructed simultaneously through a polymorphous structure of power relations that transcend bottom-up and top-down binaries.
—Rebecca DeWolf, Ph.D.
[1] Gary Gerstle, Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[2] Ibid., 9.
[3] Ibid., 194.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 85.
[6] Ibid., 124.
[7] Ibid., 312-313.
[8] Ibid., 308.
[9] Gerstle cites the works of James Green, Staughton Lynd, and Jeremy Breecher as examples of this interpretations. Gerstle, 125n.
[10] Ibid., 125.
[11] Gerstle cites Eric F. Goldman’s The Crucial Decade- and After, 1945-1960 (New York, 1960), as an example of this interpretation. Gerstle, 263.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid., 313.
Categories Reviewing HistoryTags American History, Great Depression, Labor History, political history, political language, scholarly book reviews, social history, World War II
Post navigation
Review: Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, 2003.
Book Review: Linda Gordon’s Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (1976).
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the PresentPrinter-friendly versionPDF version
Buy From Amazon
Book:
Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present
Gary Gerstle
Princeton, N.J, Princeton University Press, 2015, ISBN: 9780691162942; Price: £24.95
Reviewer:
Dr Thomas Rodgers
Newcastle University
Citation:
Dr Thomas Rodgers, review of Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present, (review no. 1930)
DOI: 10.14296/RiH/2014/1930
Date accessed: 12 March, 2017
Gary Gerstle’s Liberty and Coercion is a tour de force account of American governance that manages to survey the chronological and geographical breadth of US history with a judicious depth of precise detail and example. The great strength of this book rests on the clarity with which Gerstle unfolds the narrative of the evolution of the American state, in particular that of the federal or central state, illuminating the complex interplay of the different elements of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. Indeed, whilst the thesis of the work is concerned with the potentially abstract theme of the nature of governance, it could equally serve as required reading for undergraduate students of American history. The vital constitutional context in which political events could develop is rendered very clearly and is carefully tied to the evolving debates about how to interpret the framework provided by the Founding Fathers that began with ratification.
The scale of the book’s coverage makes this a work of synthesis and its contribution to a better understanding of the nature of American governance consequently derives from the delineation of processes that tend to become more visible from the macro perspective than the more typical focus of regional and periodic specialism. Gerstle’s overarching contention rests on the renewed emphasis on the differentiation of the inherent purpose of government enacted by the federal state on the one hand and the individual states on the other. Chapter one deals in a classical manner with the emergence of the prototypical liberal state of the Constitution and Bill of Rights, a government resting on an acknowledgement of the consent of the people and concerned with limiting the powers of the central state. Chapter two rightly asserts the necessity of reinvigorating historical scrutiny of the US state with the role of the states, and particularly with recognition of their ‘police power’ to regulate the lives of citizens. Gerstle has borrowed the term from ‘judicial circles’, reflecting the degree to which many portions of the book draw upon court cases for their evidence (p. 56). This ostensibly binary division established in the first part of the book (it is divided into four parts and ten chapters) will prove one of the central animating tensions for the thesis as a whole, the paradox of liberty and coercion in the conception of American governance. The division is not the old chestnut of states’ rights, although elements of that struggle inevitably intrude, rather it is the rationale for investigating the mechanisms of struggles for liberty and civil rights. As the book makes clear, over the course of American history the different branches of government have advanced and retarded citizens’ claims to equality.
Although there is a strong basis for this oppositional framework Gerstle necessarily undercuts such neatness with examples of central state coercion, such as Andrew Jackson’s campaign against the Red Sticks, the enforcement of Prohibition via the Eighteenth Amendment, and wartime and Cold War suppression of free speech. The growth and reach of the federal state in the post-Second World War context of permanent threat is a sadly unsurprising catalogue of paranoid persecution, but similar powers were exercised in the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts (p. 128). In sketching such an expansive view of governance clearly, certain elements of complexity are somewhat compressed. Specifically, the paradox of liberty and coercion as intractable but necessary components of the liberal state itself is rather diluted by division into the two different locations of sovereignty.(1) However, this question of emphasis reflects the variations of the US model from the European, suggesting further avenues for exploration and evaluation, and the distinction further erodes in the subsequent chapters.
Chapter three on the ‘Strategies of liberal rule’ provides the final foundation stone for the subsequent unfolding of government actions in the 20th century and beyond. Again, Gerstle deploys the breadth of vision to identify three different methods by which the federal government operated beyond the limits imposed by the framers of the Constitution. The first, exemption, applied to spaces or during times where the Constitution permitted greater leeway for action by the executive branch of government. Second, surrogacy, was developed to expand governmental oversight by inventive interpretation of existing constitutional provisions. Third, privatization, in which state and commercial enterprises, or eventually voluntary organisations of various stripes, cooperated to achieve either commercial or social ends. Gerstle refers back to these strategies across the ensuing chapters, exploring their appropriation under different guises in response to the difficulties encountered in times of war and economic crisis, or political unrest.
From this foundation, chapters four to ten go on to explore different interactions between state and citizen, sometimes witnessing the entrenchment of liberty, oftentimes its suppression. For those already familiar with particular periods or social movements the detail of some of the highlighted events will probably be reasonably familiar, but it is the aggregation of so many key events which endows the nuanced exploration of government initiatives and actions with analytical purpose. The case study of the American Protective Association during the First World War (pp. 134–6) is a chilling example of mass vigilantism operating under the authority of the state, specifically of the Attorney General. Interrogation and detention of thousands to identify possible draft evaders was undertaken by self-appointed volunteers who paid little heed to notions of due process.
The security threat posed by the First World War was still insufficient to break down, or supersede, the limited state designed by the founders, to the chagrin of those who wanted more active state intervention to improve the lives of citizens, and to those who wanted to improve state security. Following immediately from the episode of vigilante patrols is a brief account of J. Edgar Hoover’s early steering of the FBI, which in this period, in spite of its activity against those who were not citizens, was still constrained by congressional alarm at the role of a security apparatus. Later, as discussed in chapter eight, the ideological conflict sown with the Cold War relegated such qualms and expanded the reach of the security services both at home and abroad.
Balanced against the coercive practices of the federal state is an account, particularly in chapter six, of the development of governmental intervention to support the development of ‘positive’ liberty. This marked the shift in perception from the protections guaranteed by a non-interfering state, to protection offered by an assistive state. Gerstle explores this shifting perspective most fully in relation to the New Deal legislation pertaining to agriculture, but carefully contextualised against the longer history of agrarian protest. Unlike the repressive treatment meted out to industrial worker protests, the political clout of America’s farmers was respected, or at least courted by, politicians at state and federal level, which was a legacy of the Jeffersonian ideal. The success of New Deal legislation in this field derived from the extensive penetration of the United States Department of Agriculture into the local administration of rural American from the start of the 20th century. Responding to the crisis of the Great Depression, the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 could build upon the existing framework of the USDA to engage directly with ‘millions of citizens’ in an unprecedented manner. At the root of this engagement was the transfer of federal funding to individual farmers, something that Gerstle notes came to be seen ‘as a constitutional right’ (pp. 203–4).
The penultimate chapter investigates the other great period of central state intervention to protect liberty – this time the constitutionally mandated liberties of the Fourteenth Amendment – by the numerous and far-reaching decisions of the Supreme Court under chief justice Earl Warren. Specifically, the tenor of the Court’s decisions was to intervene in the states’ police powers, which were coercive of citizens’ actions. The racism of segregation which was enforced by state legislation, or in the failure to apply the laws equally, was finally attacked directly by the Court. In these decisions, succinctly summarised throughout the chapter, the Supreme Court gradually ensured that the provisions of the Bill of Rights were uniformly respected at state level. As Gerstle notes, ‘The Warren Court broke the power of the state, a near revolution in American governance’ (p. 295).
Although the Supreme Court had made some spectacularly bad decisions with the intent of maintaining the limited role of the federal government, restoring the force and extending the applicability of the Bill of Rights and Fourteenth Amendment proved to be constitutionally more controversial and fragile even for the justices themselves. The theoretical principles adopted in the 1960s, those of incorporation and substantive due process, reflected a belief that rights not explicitly clarified by the Constitution or subsequent amendments could still be inferred as congruent with the purpose of those fundamental laws to protect liberty. Yet, as chapter ten reveals, the Conservative backlash against 1960s and 1970s liberalism produced the counter-argument of ‘originalism’ to the workings of the Court. Restricting the state by advocating a strict interpretation of the Framers’ principles and understanding from the end of the eighteenth century was just one aspect of the wider Regan ‘revolution’. Gerstle is very good at juxtaposing this ideological assault with the policies extending government expenditure on military projects.
Liberty and Coercion deliberately targets a more public readership and this is most evident in the polemical (but justified) conclusion which brings the evolution of the US state into the present day, with the briefest suggestions for the future. Given the potential fragility of some of the more inventive strategies for reinterpreting the Constitution to expand the federal government’s protection of liberty – whether in its negative or positive guises – and the recent deadlock of the extremely partisan Congress, Gerstle aligns himself with calls for a return to constitutional amendment as the safest, albeit extremely difficult, route to preserve liberty.
For American citizens this book is a valuable statement on the historical and constitutional development of the state’s reach into their lives. Its connection of the principles and flaws of the Founding Fathers’ conception of a ‘liberal’ government to present-day hostilities over the Affordable Care Act has great explanatory power. At this moment, in the midst of one of the most surprising primary contests for the party nominations for the presidential election, which is producing an alarming rhetoric of coercion, Gerstle’s book will provoke debate. Hopefully its examples of the dangers of ill-conceived and ill-regulated coercive power will underpin thoughtful and considered responses.
For historians of the American state the synthesis is equally valuable for bringing together so many different locations in which government and citizen contested the paradoxes of liberty. The emphasis on class as well as of race provides a valuable backdrop to the complex evolution of the purpose of the state and the constant negotiation between the necessity and acceptability of coercion. Gerstle’s suggestions for re-thinking the classic periodisation of the growth of the federal government, along with the terminology for federal initiatives to circumvent the constraints of the Constitution, provide important reference points against which to test focussed studies of specific processes or variations. Inevitably in such an expansive work there are aspects of detail and complexity that are compressed, but on the whole the balance of narrative, pace and explanatory detail are judiciously weighed. There are, however, certain aspects which would seem to warrant more expansive treatment, particularly on the issue of coercion. The only coverage of the internment of Japanese civilians during the Second World War is a brief mention of Earl Warren’s involvement as the California state governor (p. 286). This choice reflects, perhaps, the work’s primary purpose to explore American governance insofar as it relates to its citizens. The full range of coercive practices that the state could deploy were not to be constrained by constitutional safeguards when applied to those who were portrayed as other. To conclude, this is a fine and satisfying work, but as the range of Gerstle’s book makes clear the paradox of liberty and coercion in the American state is one of constant evolution and therefore requires vigilant scrutiny both of its present state and of its historical antecedents.
Notes
E. A. Goerner and Walter J. Thompson, ‘Politics and coercion’, Political Theory, 24, 4 (1996), 620–52.Back to (1)
The author is happy to accept this review and does not wish to comment further.
May 2016
By GLENN C. ALTSCHULER | Post
ed: Sunday, March
13, 2016 12:00 am
Former United States Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings,
D-S.C., often reminded his
constituents of the man
who went to college on the GI Bill; got electricity
from the TVA; bought a ho
me, started a business and
sent his kids to school with government-backed loan
s; drove to work on the In
terstate; received Social
Security and Medicare payments;
took an Amtrak to Washington, D.C
., when floods hit to apply for
disaster relief, and spent some time in Smithsonian
museums. Then one day he
wrote a letter to his
congressman: “Get the government of
f my back,” he exclaimed. “I’m
tired of paying for all those
p
rograms created for
ungrateful people.”
The two impulses displayed by Hollings’ war vetera
n, Gary Gerstle, a profes
sor of history at the
University of Cambridge reminds us, shape — and
confound — attitudes toward
public power in the
United States. Many Americans expect local, state,
and sometimes federal governments to promote the
welfare of citizens; they also de
mand a sizeable sphere for indivi
dual freedom on which no government
can infringe.
In “Liberty and Coercion,” Gerstle
provides an informative and sophis
ticated account of the impact and
import of this contradiction throug
hout American history. He shows
how political leaders “improvised”
to expand the powers of the federa
l government beyond wh
ere they were originally meant to go,
especially through New Deal legi
slation, Cold War defense and infr
astructure policies, civil rights
reforms and decisions by the Unite
d States Supreme Court to apply th
e Bill of Rights to the states.
The innovations helped
solve a variety of economic and social pr
ograms, he argues, but the changes they
achieved were incomplete. They le
ft private interests and state govern
ments with enormous reservoirs of
p
ower over public policy. And they stimulated a ba
cklash that has generate
d “unremitting hostility” that
has all but paralyzed th
e federal government.
One of Gerstle’s most interesting claims involves
the use of exemption, surr
ogacy and privatization by
federal government officials in the
19th and 20th centuries. The U.S. C
onstitution, he points out, gave the
central government virtually no authority to legisl
ate in many areas. Exemption involved using authority
over war, international trade an
d immigration to free the centra
l government from constitutional
constraints. Through surrogacy,
the government cited its enumerat
ed powers — to regulate commerce,
levy taxes, establish a postal sy
stem and promote national security
— to achieve unenumerated policy
goals. Thus the commerce
clause was invoked to le
gitimate the Mann Act of
1910 to outlaw transporting
women across state lines for the purpose of prostitute
and as a “peg” on which
to hang the Civil Rights
Bill of 1964. Privatization was the strate
gy that built the transcontinental railroad.
An alternative strategy, Gerstle indicates, is to am
end the Constitution. Difficult as it may be to pull off,
Book review: Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Governme... http://www.tulsaworld.com/scene/books/book-review-liberty
-and-coercio...
1 of 2
3/14/2016 8:42 AM
such an approach, he suggests, may well be necess
ary to give us the tools, the flexibility and the
confidence, none of them cu
rrently at hand, to fashio
n a government that works. It’s a bold — and scary
—
conclusion to a thoughtful and ti
mely book about the character and
constraints of American politics.