Harvard University Press
Progressive New World
About this book
The paradox of progressivism continues to fascinate more than one hundred years on. Democratic but elitist, emancipatory but coercive, advanced and assimilationist, Progressivism was defined by its contradictions. In a bold new argument, Marilyn Lake points to the significance of turn-of-the-twentieth-century exchanges between American and Australasian reformers who shared racial sensibilities, along with a commitment to forging an ideal social order. Progressive New World demonstrates that race and reform were mutually supportive as Progressivism became the political logic of settler colonialism.
White settlers in the United States, who saw themselves as path-breakers and pioneers, were inspired by the state experiments of Australia and New Zealand that helped shape their commitment to an active state, women’s and workers’ rights, mothers’ pensions, and child welfare. Both settler societies defined themselves as New World, against Old World feudal and aristocratic societies and Indigenous peoples deemed backward and primitive.
In conversations, conferences, correspondence, and collaboration, transpacific networks were animated by a sense of racial kinship and investment in social justice. While “Asiatics” and “Blacks” would be excluded, segregated, or deported, Indians and Aborigines would be assimilated or absorbed. The political mobilizations of Indigenous progressives—in the Society of American Indians and the Australian Aborigines’ Progressive Association—testified to the power of Progressive thought but also to its repressive underpinnings. Burdened by the legacies of dispossession and displacement, Indigenous reformers sought recognition and redress in differently imagined new worlds and thus redefined the meaning of Progressivism itself.
Reviews
-- Nancy F. Cott, Harvard University
-- Doug Rossinow, coeditor of Outside In: The Transnational Circuitry of US History
-- Mae M. Ngai, author of Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America
Lake powerfully invokes the Australasian connection to U.S. politics and culture, substantiating the range and depth of those ties and illuminating political thought at both ends of the geographical divide. A worthy counterpart to Daniel Rodgers’s iconic Atlantic Crossings, Progressive New World offers a fresh and valuable take on the transnational Progressive era.
-- Leon Fink, author of The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order
-- Australian Book Review
-- Clare Wright Sydney Morning Herald
-- Kornel S. Chang Labor
Topics
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Frontmatter
i -
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Contents
vii -
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Introduction: Settler Colonialism and Progressivism
1 -
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1. Self-Government, Democracy, and White Manhood
22 -
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2. An Expansive State with Socialistic Tendencies
45 -
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3. Purifying Politics through Electoral Reform
74 -
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4. Federal Idealism and Labor Realism
106 -
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5. Woman Suffrage as an Object Lesson
136 -
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6. Mothers of the Nation
169 -
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7. Labor Investigators Cross the Pacific
193 -
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8. Indigenous Progressivism Calls Settler Colonialism to Account
224 -
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Abbreviations
251 -
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Notes
253 -
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Acknowledgments
297 -
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Index
299
