Peasants, Pitchforks, and the (Found) Promise of Progressivism

Abstract

Political scientist Elizabeth Sanders has written a historian's masterpiece. Through an exploration of radical agrarianism in an age when it had supposedly disappeared, Roots of Reform connects the politics of the high and the low in a way more effective than any historian has ever done. We can now finally understand how the activism of dirt farmers influenced the very specific policies of Congress. State and society are at last reunited, after an aggressive campaign by past-minded political scientists to push the former to prominence. Single-handedly, or perhaps one should say horny-handedly, Sanders has forever recast our vision of Progressivism. Sanders's book is empirically rich, theoretically ambitious, and historiographically contentious. Drawn from the closest reading of the Congressional Record in ages, Sanders has explored the nuts-and-bolts of dozens of famous and not-so-famous congressional proposals. She has reconstructed in painstaking detail the legislative history of these bills and their multitude of amendments, as well as the voting records of their key supporters and opponents. All this work is in the service of a clear thesis, and an even clearer set of heroes. Farmers are democracy's noblemen in Roots of Reform, and besides their racism they can do almost no wrong. By advocating full public control over the basic economic institutions of the day, rural folk constructed the most original and searching critique of industrial capitalism that American history has yet experienced and a political movement that mounted the broadest challenge to the foundations of the new economic (p. 29). If this sounds like an unreconstructed Lawrence Goodwyn, read on. For Sanders's farmers were not simply doomed democrats fated to confront the system and fade away. Rather, they survived to fight many more battles in the two decades after 1896, in the process serving as the chief architects of the modern American state.