lil somem i had wrote in 2009 while i was thinkin bout war, progressivism, recession, artificial inflation, marx, and keynes, an ne book a smart dude had told me i had to read... interestin stuff... “Progressivism and the War” (A Critique by Ryan J Lawrence) Discontented America, by David Goldberg, was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999. The text comprises 204 pages divided into 8 chapters. This work, as described by the author in the preface, chronicles “the various ways in which the political, social, and economic changes generated by World War I continued to affect American society throughout the 1920s,” concentrating on “events that appeared most important to people at the time.” This critique focuses on chapter 1, “Progressivism and the War.” Intent is to critique the author’s presentation both of pre-war progressivist movements in response to industrialization and urbanization; and how war-time imperatives of Americanization and militarization served to galvanize those movements and establish a new order, with no consideration in the process for those left behind. The author’s presentation of the text does a sufficient job of covering the basic trends of late 19th to early 20th century industrial urban (Northern) America, and serves to project how the influence of those trends reinforced abandonment and omission of the South, and generally, of rural America, in scope. This creates a one-sided discourse which makes no acknowledgement of the wholesale harvesting of human capital from rural, often southern communities, or of the economic and political economic costs incurred by those communities, much less, any forward movement that did not assimilate. Goldberg constantly refers to urban social trends and the effects of industrialization in urban areas. He expounds upon various labor movements organized around and in response to larger factories and corporations, but says nothing of those who, instead of presenting themselves to be exploited by labor organizations or the corporations they fed from, became redundant, or the rise of tenant farm and prison systems based on plantation economics, much less, those who maintained a non political cultural perspective and forwarded private economy nonetheless. Thus Goldberg informs of the deficit of political interest in industrial technologies, intellectual development, entrepreneurs, and labor populace remaining in rural areas, effectively competing with big city industrialization for labor. Goldberg posits that World War I served to quell socio-economic progressive movements, insofar as Americans acquiesced to the political interests of the industrial machine. Goldberg is effective in structuring language to be clear on this point. However, Goldberg does not construct language that addresses the other side of the equation. In the lives of average Americans, war, particularly coupled with mass migration, is loss, for families, businesses, and communities. Given this deficit, his initial position is compromised. Rather than offering focus in this regard, Goldberg consistently places the spotlight on federal agency, product manufacturing corporations, financial institutions, media and advertising corporations, and labor organizations, each taking a respective place at the political table, without the people. The author’s attempt to maintain a liberal position succumbs to his failure to account for progress and regression beyond political progressivisms of benefit to less than human interests. There is abundant information describing some causes and effects of mass discontent within the dynamics of urban life, but his omission of rural and Southern life beyond capital resource, is a literary re-enactment of the historical abandonment of struggling communities which afterward had little choice but to follow the courses of industrialization or underdevelopment. Goldberg has silenced the voices of the same masses and replaced them with the monolithic droning of national political and corporate interests. Goldberg’s language is an imposition of the very machinery which he has set out to expose to the reader. While informative to the mechanisms of some decision making processes which in part defined urban life in the 1920s, the author does not critically engage matters of cost, urban or rural. The blurring, stymieing, or outright removal of cultural order which took place in the 1920s is repeated in blatant fashion, consequently issuing his audience a national political imperative. The author’s words resonate in current auditoriums of progressivism. The political trend toward rhetoric of autonomous individualism is highlighted, as the drive toward exclusive inclusion and conflict marches on. Ideals of an American identity stripped of cultural and geographical roots, and repurposed to bottom lines and political entitlement, by prioritizing political leverage, are advanced. The author’s construction of the text, then, can be read in more than one way. It is true that many progressive movements took place previous to the 1920s, and that urbanization and industrialization were key in the development of the America that was willing and able to enter and win the First World War. It is also true that organic American responses to urban dynamics did seek to address the shortcomings of the new urban America. In a different light, it is also glaringly obvious just how little consideration was given to the interests of rural, particularly southern, people(s) of that time, by the controlling interests of the day, and by history since. Labor was unceremoniously herded to urban centers and acclimated to the new imperative through progressive movements of all sorts. Urban progressivism has since been considered a “given” factor in labor ideology, drafted into service of political industrial development, to the exclusion of rural and southern, particularly, black, cultural movements. Goldberg’s text clearly supports this premise, and gives little voice to alternatives.
Posted on: Mon, 20 Oct 2014 06:40:19 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015