Progressive Internationalism and the Road Not Taken

Abstract

According to Alan Dawley's synthesis, the social conscience and political commitments of American were fundamentally shaped by their internationalist sensibility. Where other historians have diagnosed with an irrational case of status anxiety, indicted them as old-line elites out to control immigrant workers, or lamented their promotion of a regulatory system that ultimately produced conservative results, Dawley points abroad to address another dimension of the literature. Despite their diverse interests and affiliations, he argues, were fundamentally driven by a hope that the promotion of social justice and revitalization of public life in the United States would form the core of an international campaign. In a world knit together by far-flung markets and the international state system, Dawley explains, progressives confronted social problems that crossed national boundaries, and their solutions did the same (p. 3). Revolutions in Russia, China, and Mexico inspired many of them with the sense that their reformist efforts at home might become part of a wider, global transformation in which popular needs would surpass the dictates of laissez-faire, and participatory democracy would replace imperial and dictatorial tyranny. But U.S. intervention in those revolutions and the pivotal American entry into World War I divided the movement and betrayed many of its fondest hopes. The result, Dawley argues, was a sadder and wiser politics that we would still do well to emulate, a conclusion that raises fundamental questions about the concept of progressivism itself. To introduce the new internationalism that animated so many progressives, Dawley provides a series of illustrative vignettes. Rather than trying to define a single, ideological core, he focuses on the varied experiences of key individuals in a period of rapid economic change and intellectual ferment. Advances in communications, the mobility of labor forces, and the rise of an international working-class movement all led reformers like Jane