Visions of Progress: The Left-Liberal Tradition in America

Politics and Culture in Modern America

by Doug Rossinow

Liberals and leftists in the United States have not always been estranged from one another as they are today. Historian Doug Rossinow examines how the cooperation and the creative tension between left-wing radicals and liberal reformers advanced many of the most important political values of the twentieth century, including free speech, freedom of conscience, and racial equality. Visions of Progress chronicles the broad alliances of radical and liberal figures who were driven by a particular concept of social progress—a transformative vision in which the country would become not simply wealthier or a bit fairer but fundamentally more democratic, just, and united. Believers in this vision—from the settlement-house pioneer Jane Addams and the civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois in the 1890s and after, to the founders of the ACLU in the 1920s, to Minnesota Governor Floyd Olson and assorted labor-union radicals in the 1930s, to New Dealer Henry Wallace in the 1940s—belonged to a left-liberal tradition in America. They helped push political leaders, including Presidents Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman, toward reforms that made the goals of opportunity and security real for ever more Americans. Yet, during the Cold War era of the 1950s and '60s, leftists and liberals came to view one another as enemies, and their influential alliance all but vanished. Visions of Progress revisits the period between the 1880s and the 1940s, when reformers and radicals worked together along a middle path between the revolutionary left and establishment liberalism. Rossinow takes the story up to the present, showing how the progressive connection was lost and explaining the consequences that followed. This book introduces today's progressives to their historical predecessors, while offering an ambitious reinterpretation of issues in American political history.

336 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2007

Reviews

[Cathy]

Max Elbaum says:
For a new examination of the very timely matter of "liberals, leftists, and
the tortured relations between the two" check out Doug Rossinow's new book,
VISIONS OF PROGRESS: THE LEFT-LIBERAL TRADITION IN AMERICA. (Also useful if you
are trying to get a handle on the last 60 years of U.S. history is a collection
Doug co-edited in 2006, THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1945: HISTORICAL INTERPRETATIONS;
it includes my 2001 essay, "What Legacy from Radical Internationalism of 1968?”)