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McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement
in America, 1870-1920. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

In A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in

America, 1870-1920, Michael McGerr gives an historical overview of the Progressive

era in America. In doing so he argues:

That progressivism created much of our contemporary political predicament. The

epic of reform at the dawn of the twentieth century helps explain the less-than-

epic politics at the dawn of the twenty-first. Progressivism, the creed of the

crusading middle-class, offered the promise of utopianism--- and generated the

inevitable letdown of unrealistic expectations. (xiv)

He explains that this Progressive creed created a too broad range of expectations. These

expectations included ending class conflict, controlling big business, segregation,

purification of politics, and the disciplining of leisure time.

In order to prove his argument McGerr studies the Victorian middle-class or what

he and many scholars call the Progressives. He takes this Victorian middle-class and

analyses four main examples of their struggles. These struggles consisted of the battles to

reform society to their standards. McGerr explains that these standards were a medium

between what he called mutualism and individualism. Mutualism was the concept that

the family or community all helped out in the means of production and survival.

Individualism is where one promotes self-help or self-reliance in achieving their goals

rather than the communities or families goals. McGerr uses these concepts to show how

the Victorian middle-class thought that the working-class was too extreme with their

mutualism and the upper ten were too extreme with their individualism. The struggles

that McGerr focuses on include the control of big business, to change other people, to end
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class-conflict, and to segregate people. (xv) McGerr uses the terms, mutualism and

individualism to explain many things about the Progressive movement and this

eventually leads up to the conclusion and main argument of his book. That argument is

that this movement created a middle-class with aspirations for a better world and their

lack of success explains the weak politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

McGerr has provided the historical world with a very scholarly piece of work. He

has achieved to the utmost by providing the academic world with an overview of the

Progressive era, who the Progressives actually were, and how much success these

middle-class reformers achieved or did not achieve. Although McGerr provides the

reader with an excellent source that is full of remarkable and efficient amounts of

research and organization, he does not consistently follow his argument. He does clearly

state what he is arguing, but struggles with actually focusing on his main point. It seems

as though the real argument of his book deals more with whom the Victorians were and

why they pushed so much for reform. McGerr’s book actually argues that the stresses of

industrializing America fractured old ideologies and created new ones, including

Progressivism and the Victorian middle-class. This Victorian middle-class tried to

answer the basic questions of society and in doing so created this ideology of reform and

compared their answers to that of the worldviews. McGerr’s book is a great source and

solid read for an overview of the Progressive era, but his focus on his argument is weak

and could confuse the reader.

John C. McKnight

Appalachian State University

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