Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution.

• Author: Gamble, Richard M.
• Position: Book review

Changing the World: American Progressives in War and

Revolution

By Alan Dawley

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Pp. x, 409. $49.50 cloth, $22.95 paperback.

At the end of his "Four Freedoms" speech in January 1941, Franklin Roosevelt recommitted the United States to the Founders' "perpetual, peaceful revolution" on behalf of change. That ceaseless revolution, he pledged nearly a year before Pearl Harbor, would now oppose totalitarianism's "new order" by defending and expanding a "moral order," a "world order," of universal civil liberties, economic justice, disarmament, and international cooperation. The yearning to change the world runs deep in U.S. history. From the Puritans' redemptive mission to the Enlightenment's secular New Jerusalem to evangelical millennialism, America and its foreign admirers have constructed a national destiny of dizzying heights. The high-water mark of that calling (so far) came with the Progressive Era's righteous crusade to redeem America and the world, a wave of reforms that later shaped FDR's New Deal and war socialism.

Alan Dawley's Changing the World: American Progressives in War and Revolution interprets the progressive movement in light of this redemptive impulse. Dawley tells the story of the "founding generation" of American Progressives during roughly the first third of the twentieth century. He follows the rise, fall, and rebirth of the founders' movement, with all of its contradictions, ironies, good intentions, mixed results, earnest efforts to remake and perpetuate itself after the disappointments of World War I, and subsequent revival in the New Deal. He focuses primarily on the Progressives' engagement in social and economic justice, commitment to the public interest, internationalism, and optimistic faith in human progress. These reformers left a deep imprint on the American character and what it means to be a good citizen. In fact, "the progressive generation gave America a social conscience and a more cosmopolitan outlook" (p. 72). Changing the World is a sympathetic story written by a faithful, disappointed, yet hopeful believer who sees the best of the Progressive agenda as "still pertinent" to U.S. politics and foreign policy, who regrets progressivism's co-optation by the vague bipartisan liberalism of post--World War II politics, and who awaits its revival in the twenty-first century.

A clear indication that Changing the World operates within the Progressive paradigm is...