Another Progressive Era?

Abstract

Another Progressive Era? Daniel T. Rodgers (bio) Isser Woloch, The Postwar Moment: Progressive Forces in Britain, France, and the United States after World War II. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. xxii + 515 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $40.00. In the aftermath of the Second World War, a burst of reform aspirations arose across the globe. Pent-up progressive ambitions of the interwar years erupted into the postwar era, fueled by experiences of war mobilization and wartime hardship. A human rights agenda began to crystalize around the war’s atrocities. Communism’s promise of a revolutionary break with capitalism had never seemed brighter. The end of empires, the hollow promise that World War I’s victors had raised in 1919, now seemed finally within reach. Whatever frame it took, conviction that the world should not be allowed to slide back into its earlier structures of power and politics shaped the idea of the “postwar.” In his most recent book, the Columbia University historian Isser Woloch turns his attention from the era of the French Revolution, on which most of his career has been focused, to a much later moment of disruption. The Postwar Moment does not survey the entire postwar terrain, as Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (2005) did for Europe more than a decade ago.1 It undertakes, more modestly, to track the achievements and aspirations of the non-Marxist Left in the United States, France, and Britain during the Second World War and the war’s immediate aftermath. In France, Woloch pays closest attention to the mouvement républicain populaire (MRP), a social-Catholic political movement that emerged out of the anti-Nazi and anti-Vichy Resistance into brief but powerful political influence after 1945. In Britain, Woloch focuses on the agenda and achievements of the Labour governments of 1945–51. In the United States, his focus is on the Democratic Party and the CIO. In each of these three cases, the window of progressive possibility differed. The postwar progressive moment was shortest in France. In the parliamentary elections held in the first flush of liberation in the fall of 1945, a tripartite coalition of MRP progressives, non-Marxist socialists, and communists won an overwhelming majority, promising to set France on a new social-economic footing for the future. That alliance framed the Fourth Republic’s constitution and launched an ambitious program of economic and [End Page 105] social reforms, but then fell apart in a cascade of workers’ strikes in the fall of 1947. The postwar “moment” lasted longer in Britain, from the Labour Party’s stunning electoral victory in 1945 through the Conservatives’ return to power in 1951. Set within this context, the Truman administration from 1945 to 1952 should be not be seen simply as the final unraveling of FDR’s New Deal, Woloch urges, but as part of a transnational moment of progressive promise worth understanding on its own. The lasting achievements of the postwar progressive coalitions varied across the three nations. They were weakest in France. Nationalization of coal, electricity, and gas production; the airlines; and the largest insurance companies and banks had already been undertaken by De Gaulle’s provisional government under pressure from the Left before the tripartite government came into office. Women’s suffrage was the result of De Gaulle’s decree. During the tripartite government’s two years in power, however, it finalized a major extension and coordination of France’s late-1920s social insurance provisions. The first steps in an ambitious program of housing construction were undertaken. Institutions for national economic planning were inaugurated. But popular unrest over wages and price inflation, the wildfire spread of strikes, and communist opposition to the terms of U.S. economic assistance broke the alliance apart before more could be accomplished. Progressives’ most dramatic leap forward took place in Britain. The Labour Party had been on the margins of British politics before World War II. Its two brief periods in office in the 1920s had accomplished little. But now in the wake of the war, Labour majorities seized the mandate of their overwhelming electoral victory in 1945 to radically remake British economic and social policy. They...