Unity through Education

The last four years have not only witnessed the largest domestic protests in U.S. history, but the steady polarization of U.S. politics has been a widening trend for decades. Policymakers eager to heal the country can learn from history. The Progressive Era offers one big idea to reduce division: public education. A robust educational system undergirds progress, stability, and unity, and it enables follow-on opportunities of social reform and equality. The Progressive Era’s laudable expansion of public education also, however, reversed progress on racial equality and neglected to resolve an inflammatory media, mistakes that have contributed to today’s division. Learning from the successes and failures of one of the most ambitious Progressive Era programs presents the United States with one path forward to solving its internal turmoil.

“My Good Italian Friends”: Vida Scudder and Boston's Circolo Italo-Americano

The Circolo Italo-Americano, a Progressive-era group of educated Italian immigrants and affluent Bostonians, was founded by settlement movement pioneer Vida Dutton Scudder to integrate Italians into American life through “friendly personal contacts,” social events, and educational opportunities. The Circolo included Italian leadership and focused on immigrants’ contributions, not on “assimilation.”

ON SIMON NELSON PATTEN’S PROGRESSIVISM: A NOTE

This article is an attempt to offer an assessment of the main coordinates of Simon Nelson Patten’s views on democracy and biological determinism. This will allow us to better delineate the differences—as well as the affinities—between Patten and the core of progressives discussed by Thomas C. Leonard in a series of path-breaking contributions, culminating in his Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. It is our contention that even within the persisting intricacies, ambiguities, and contradictions of Patten’s expository style, it is possible to trace a shift in some aspects of his ideas—a gradual evolution that makes his peculiar brand of progressivism different from that of his most “illiberal” counterparts.

Democratic Decline and the Politics of the Upswing: How the United States May Have Come Together a Century Ago but Can It Do It Again?

Robert Putman’s The Upswing (written with Shaylyn Romney Garrett) provides a powerful meta-analysis of American social, political, economic and cultural change throughout the twentieth century. What this analysis reveals is the existence of an almost perfect arc of social progress which begins from a low position around the Gilded Age at the beginning of the twentieth century and then climbs across all variables until reaching a highpoint around 1960. The Progressive Era, Putnam argues, engineered an ‘upswing’ against inequality, polarisation, social disarray and a culture of self-centredness. Since then, however, the data suggest that a severe downswing has occurred which explains the existence of deep divisions and polarised politics in the United States. Putnam’s core argument is simple: The United States has pulled itself out of a trough before and it can do it again. In a post-Trump context, this argument could hardly be more welcome which may explain the rave reviews this book has generally received. Nevertheless, the core weakness of The Upswing is that it arguably tells us far more about how the United States ‘came together a century ago’ but far less about how it ‘can do it again’ in the future.