The Progressive Era and its Discontents

Abstract

A casual glance at these two ambitious interpretations of American cultural history in the early twentieth century might suggest that they deal with quite different times and places. According to Robert Crunden this was a period in which progressivism dominated the cultural life of the nation, while on T. Jackson Lears's reading the prevailing mood among the custodians of culture was one of recoil from an overcivilized existence towards what he terms antimodernism. A second look would reveal that the authors are indeed examining the same time and place but new confusions might arise from the observation that certain figures Jane Addams, for example appear in both accounts as, respectively, a progressive and an antimodernist. There is more at issue here than the meaning of these labels ; our historians are wearing different coloured spectacles. It would be convenient if we could simply call one right and the other wrong and have done with it but as we all know history seldom provides solutions to dilemmas such as this. We must make do with establishing which historian is wearing the better pair of spectacles. The authors' titles and subtitles tell a good deal. Both studies are broadly concerned with the fate of the religious impulse under the influence of secularizing and modernizing tendencies, but there the similarity all but ends. Crunden's subtitle evokes an earlier historiographical tradition in which bearded patricians weighed up profits and losses in the account called civilization. Lears's subtitle, on the other hand, is redolent of contemporary preoccupations with socio-cultural