Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917.

• Author: MCGUIRE, ROBERT A.
• Position: Review

* Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 By Elizabeth Sanders Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 528. $48.00 cloth, $16.00 paper.

In Roots of Reform, Elizabeth Sanders sets out to explain the development of the American national state during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maintaining that modern American statism can be traced to the farmer protest movements of the last third of the nineteenth century. Sanders's thesis is straightforward: "agrarian movements constituted the most important political force driving the development of the American national state in the half century before World War I" (p. 1). Aligned politically with industrial workers, farmers, especially periphery farmers, comprised the important force behind American statism.

Sanders contends that most historical and sociological studies of the development of the American state concentrate on the failure of farmers and workers "to restructure economic relationships and erect a positive populist or social democratic state" (p. 2). What the "literature has not provided is an account of the political interaction" (p. 2) of farmers and workers, nor has it considered that the expansion of American statism during the Progressive Era originated with farmer demands. The literature fails to emphasize the importance of farmer movements because "the first wave of the new social history" (p. 2) exhibited an urban bias, and the renewed interest in state theory in the 1980s led to a capitalist-worker bias. In state theory, state actors are seen primarily as executive branch officials whose constituencies are capitalists and industrial workers. Sanders also argues that political scientists often do not recognize that social movements both shape the development of the state and are shaped by the actions of state actors.

As the United States evolved into various regional economies during the nineteenth century--the manufacturing belt, the corn belt, and the cotton belt, among others--the regions developed distinctly different constituencies, and they came to be represented in Congress by legislators who represented those constituencies. According to Sanders, the United States can be classified into three general types of regional economies: core, diverse, and periphery. A core region has an economy based and dependent on industrial and manufacturing activities. A diverse region has an economy with a wide range of economic activities and is not based or dependent only on industrial activities or only on farming activities. A periphery...