From the Social Gospel to "The Plain Bread of Leninism": A.E. Smith's Journey to the Left in the Epoch of Reaction after World War I

1994 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Mitchell
1981 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-449 ◽  
Author(s):  
William McGuire King

What happened to the social gospel impulse after World War I? Recent historians have demonstrated that many reformers did not bid farewell to reform in the 1920s.1 In the case of Protestant social liberalism, however, the precise relationship between postwar social action and the prewar social gospel movement requires further clarification. Was the former merely a continuation of the latter? Such a question is currently difficult to answer since few major studies of the social gospel bridge both historical periods. Indeed, the death or retirement by 1918 of so many early leaders of the social gospel movement, particularly Washington Gladden, Josiah Strong, and Walter Rauschenbusch, leaves the impression that an era had come to a close.


Author(s):  
Betsy Wood

The national movement to abolish child labor, led by reformer Owen Lovejoy, entered its peak political and cultural phase at the height of the Progressive Era. This chapter reveals that the movement’s embrace of federal authority became increasingly religious in nature as it joined forces with the Social Gospel movement. Pointedly, this turn paid particular attention to girls in the age of Mueller v. Oregon and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. This approach led to many victories, including the Keating-Owen Act of 1916. During World War I, however, the movement shifted as it joined forces with the American toy industry and modern child welfare campaign, setting the stage for the rise of a consumerist ethos and a secular bureaucratic approach to child welfare.


Belleten ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 76 (276) ◽  
pp. 631-646
Author(s):  
Bülent Özdemi̇r

In the 20th century Assyrians living in Diaspora have increased their search of identity because of the social and political conditions of their present countries. In doing so, they utilize the history by picking up certain events which are still kept fresh in the collective memory of the Assyrian society. World War I, which caused a large segment of the Assyrians to emigrate from the Middle East, has been considered as the milestone event of their history. They preferred to use and evaluate the circumstances during WW I in terms of a genocidal attack of the Ottomans against their nation. This political definition dwarfs the promises which were not kept given by their Western allies during the war for an independent Assyrian state. The aspects of Assyrian civilization existed thousands of years ago as one of the real pillars of their identity suffer from the artificially developed political unification around the aspects of their doom in WWI presented as a genocidal case. Additionally, this plays an efficient role in removal of existing religious and sectarian differences for centuries among Assyrians. This paper aims at showing in the framework of primary sources how Assyrian genocidal claims are being used pragmatically in the formation of national consciousness in a very effective way. Not the Assyrian civilization but their constructed history in WWI is used for the formation of their nation definition.


Author(s):  
Catherine Robson

This chapter resurrects “The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna.” Charles Wolfe's poem, a reimagining of the hasty interment of a fallen general after one of the land battles in the Napoleonic wars, was repeatedly quoted by soldiers and other individuals during the American Civil War when they found themselves having to organize, or witness, the burials of dead comrades. In recent years, cultural historians of Great Britain have tried to account for the massive shift in burial and memorial practices for the common soldier that occurred between 1815 and 1915. The chapter argues that the presence of Wolfe's poem in the hearts and minds of ordinary people played its part in creating the social expectations that led to the establishment of the National Cemeteries in the United States, and thus, in due course, the mass memorialization of World War I.


Author(s):  
Charles S. Maier

This chapter examines social conflict at the end of World War I in three dimensions: in terms of class, elite, and interest groups. Conservatives throughout Europe were preoccupied with class divisions and the vulnerability of their own favored stations in life, but their sense of vulnerability emerged in different language and day-to-day disputes. In France, social defensiveness was revealed directly by continuing justification and discussion of the bourgeoisie, while in Germany the fixation with the Social Democratic Party and in Italy the defense of “liberalism” disclosed underlying class malaise. The chapter explains how these differences emerged within a pervasive anxiety about social polarization. It also considers the ways in which the elites sought to utilize the opportunity to reassert their older social hegemony in the context of corporate capitalism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
Emily Greble

The Balkan Wars of 1912–1913 and World War I shattered the social fabric of Ottoman Europe and led to a radical revision of the region’s political boundaries. How did experiences of successive traumas—expulsions, famine, disease, massacres, and new occupation regimes—shape Muslims’ understandings of the European project and their experiences within it? This chapter analyzes this catastrophic era from diverse Muslim perspectives. It reveals how many Muslims found legal promises of political equality and rights ambiguous and intangible, and instead sought to define their own terms of political belonging. They wanted autonomy, confessional sovereignty, and the protection of Islamic institutions and property.


2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 173-175
Author(s):  
Reiner Tosstorff

This is a very useful bibliographical tool produced by the efforts of the International Association of Labour History Institutions (IALHI). This association comprises more than one hundred archives, libraries and research centers all over the world, though the vast majority are located in Europe, and not all of them have the same importance, reflecting the geographical and political unevenness of socialism's history. This particular volume aims to list all the publications of the social-democratic internationals after 1914, i.e. from the time of the political split due to the support for World War I by most social-democratic parties. This means that the left-wing, beginning with the Kienthal-Zimmerwald movement during the war and leading to the “Communist International” from 1919 on, is not represented here. But also left-wing splits from social democracy in later years, as in the 1930s with the “London Bureau” of left-wing socialist parties (and also the Bureau's predecessors) are excluded here, as they openly campaigned against social democracy. Also, a few international workers' institutions (mainly in the cultural field) that had been founded before 1914, but tried to maintain their independence after 1914 faced with the political split, are therefore not listed as well.


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