American Liberalism Research Articles

The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism

The People’s Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism

Liberal Quakerism in America in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1790–1920 by Thomas D. Hamm

Reviewed by: Liberal Quakerism in America in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1790–1920 by Thomas D. Hamm S. Spencer Wells Liberal Quakerism in America in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1790—1920. By Thomas D. Hamm. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2020. 97 pp. Notes, and bibliography. Paper $91.18; ebook $85.00. Just what defines religious liberalism? Such is the question which numerous scholars from Gary Dorrien (The Making of American Liberal Theology) to Amy Kittlestrom (The Religion of Democracy) have increasingly asked in recent years. Yet, few studies have specifically probed Quaker contributions to the growing subfield. Thomas D. Hamm’s recent work Liberal Quakerism in America in the Long Nineteenth Century, 1790–1920 seeks to rectify this lacuna in the literature—and does so with remarkable precision. For Hamm, the growth of Quaker liberalism is defined by Friends’ growing commitment to four distinct ideological tenets: a modernistic belief that God proved “immanent in the world,” faith in the ability of scientific rationalism to explain the divine’s purpose, an allergy to Calvinism, and a deep-seated suspicion of doctrines or actions which tended to [End Page 92] erode an individual’s freedom of conscience (p. 2). The spiritual genealogy which Hamm lays out to explain the genesis and flowering of such a faith is largely convincing. He begins his story with the proto-liberal Hannah Barnard, disowned by Hudson Monthly Meeting (NY) in 1801 for—among other things—arguing that parts of the Hebrew Bible which condoned war were inaccurate. Hamm argues that Barnard walked a pioneering path which other, more organizationally savvy individuals, would soon follow. In clear and concise prose, Hamm charts the ways in which the first stirrings of liberal Quakerism took partial root in Hicksite Quakerism, and the Progressive Friends, while finally maturing as a growing number of Gurneyites imbibed and expressed liberal sympathies in the later nineteenth century. Of particular note is the way in which the trajectory of Quaker liberalism does not come across as a foreordained fait accompli. Hicksites, while arguing that the “Bible was not the ‘Word of God,’” for instance, also continued to hold to other, more traditional, beliefs (p 18). When a number of Hicksites championed working-class or abolitionist movements, they often found themselves on the short end of the budding organization’s disciplinary stick. While Gurneyites eventually embraced religious liberalism, in Hamm’s reading this was the work of decades. Religious liberalism, Hamm rightly argues, was historically contingent, taking numerous detours, and circling varieties of intellectual cul-de-sacs in the process. While Hamm succeeds in laying out the major mile-markers on the road to liberal Quakerism, there are moments which could use broader contextualization. Take, for instance, the notion of the Right of Private Judgment. Throughout the monograph, those Friends pushing the religious envelope along liberal lines are, by and large, seen to be the sole believers in freedom of conscience vis-à-vis their more conservative coreligionists. Yet conservative Protestants throughout the early modern era spoke articulately and often about conscience. To many, freedom of conscience meant the ability to interpret scripture privately as one wished. Even into the nineteenth century many Protestants did not necessarily agree that freedom of conscience gave individuals leeway to publicly air their religious disagreements in contradistinction to the “church’s mind.” While religious liberals—including liberal Friends—argued that such conceptions of freedom of conscience were, in reality no protection to conscience at all, this does not mean that they alone held a monopoly on the concept writ large. [End Page 93] Still, it is all too easy to be over-meticulous as a reviewer. And, while Liberal Quakerism could use a wider historical awareness, the work as a whole is seasoned with more than enough real insight and historiographical heft to make up for such minor critiques. In the final analysis, the work should be seen as essential reading for anyone seeking to trace the experiment in religious liberalism which large parts of Quakerism have long espoused. S. Spencer Wells Southern Utah University Copyright © 2021 Friends Historical Association

The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell

Reviewed by: The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism by Gregg Cantrell Matthew Hild The People's Revolt: Texas Populists and the Roots of American Liberalism. By Gregg Cantrell. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 592. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) The Populist movement of the 1890s played an important role in the history of Texas, and Texas played an important role in the history of that movement. Two previous books, The People's Party in Texas: A Study in Third Party Politics by Roscoe C. Martin (University of Texas Press, 1933), and Farmers in Rebellion: The Rise and Fall of the Southern Farmers' Alliance and People's Party in Texas (University of Texas Press, 1984) by Donna A. Barnes, have examined Texas Populism, and broader studies by historians such as Lawrence Goodwyn and Robert C. McMath have paid close attention to Texas. Significantly, McMath argued that the Southern Farmers' Alliance, which farmers formed in Lampasas County, Texas, in or around 1877, served as the "Populist vanguard" that gave birth to the People's (or Populist) Party during 1891–92. In an era that some observers have dubbed the "new" or "second" Gilded Age, the Populists remain relevant. Gregg Cantrell has written about various aspects of Texas Populism as well as the African American Populist leader John B. Rayner of Robertson County in previous journal articles and books, and he brings decades of research to this magisterial new study. In addition to providing a fresh perspective on the topic, this book serves as an almost encyclopedic examination of Texas Populism. Cantrell has utilized resources made available on the Internet as well as those only available in archives and courthouses to compile a massive trove of primary sources. The bibliography lists 123 newspapers, most from Texas but others from across the United States. Goodwyn found much of the impetus for the Populist movement in the rise and fall of the cooperative enterprises that the Farmers' Alliance established as a means of eliminating middlemen from its members' financial transactions. The People's Revolt contains an appendix that lists all the Texas Farmers' Alliance cooperatives that Cantrell "was able to identify with a reasonable degree of confidence" (445). This list is seventeen pages long and provides detailed information about each of some 320 cooperatives. Specific chapter topics include, but are not limited to, the roots of Texas Populism, of which [End Page 354] Cantrell presents a more nuanced interpretation than did Goodwyn; the birth of the Texas People's Party; the state elections of 1892, 1894, and 1896; the Texas Populists' ideological beliefs, policy positions, and efforts at crafting and passing legislation; how the Texas Populists grappled with issues of race, ethnicity, and gender; and how and why the Texas People's Party collapsed as the 1890s drew to a close. Cantrell also puts forth an informative analysis of the differences between "Populism" (upper-case "P") and the "populism" (lower-case "p") that followed. The thesis of The People's Revolt is revealed in the book's subtitle. Cantrell posits that the Populists, in Texas and elsewhere, were "the progenitors of modern liberalism" (12). Recalling some of the important proclamations of liberal icons such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon Baines Johnson, and Barack Obama, Cantrell contends that "these leaders were invoking a political ideology first enunciated by Populists, and particularly by those in Texas" (22). Earlier historians of American or southern Populism, such as John D. Hicks and C. Vann Woodward, drew links between Populism and early twentieth-century Progressivism, and as Cantrell shows and other scholars have previously shown, in Texas some Populists of the 1890s later became progressive Democrats. Making a connection between Texas Populists and LBJ and Obama is more tenuous (even though, as Cantrell explains, LBJ's grandfather was a Texas Populist himself). We have no way of knowing what an 1890s Populist would have thought of the Great Society or "Obamacare." Nevertheless, Cantrell makes a compelling argument, and he certainly shows that the Populists were at the forefront of liberal thought on pressing issues of their own era that are still relevant today. The People's Revolt is an important book, then...

Ken I. Kersch. Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism.

K<scp>en</scp> I. K<scp>ersch</scp>. <i>Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism</i>.

THE SPECIAL FEATURES OF THE INTERPRETATION OF THE SOCIO-POLITICAL DOCTRINE OF LIBERALISM IN THE WESTERN EUROPEAN, AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN TRADITIONS IN THE 18TH AND 19TH CENTURIES: COMMON AND SPECIAL

The article strives to conceptualize the basic ideas of liberalism, free from political sensitivities, emotional judgments and naive simplifications based on different methods and techniques of political and historical science, as well as general scientific approaches - a comparative historical method, a normative approach, an institutional approach, and analytical and synthetic methods. Defects of the interpretation of liberalism in Russia - opposition of “liberals” and “patriots”, domestic perceptions of liberalism as freedom in family, sexual and gender life, reduction of liberalism to the specific historical direction of post-Soviet liberalism are revealed in the paper. Furthermore, the author draws attention to the misunderstanding of liberalism in the United States: one of them refers liberalism to the social democracy, the other equates liberalism with the totalitarian teachings. In the light of the incorrect perception of liberalism in the world, the author formulates the purpose of the work as overcoming the misjudgement of liberalism by overcoming the false appreciation of liberalism by forming a concentrated view of the fundamentals of liberal socio-political teachings based on the views of leading thinkers in Western Europe, the United States of America and Russia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Which contributed significantly to the development of the fundamentals of liberalism. Predicated on the analysis of the ideas of Western European, American, and Russian liberal thinkers of the past, the author identifies common and special features of the interpretation of liberalism in different parts of the world over two centuries. Finally, the author concludes that the main features of the original liberalism are the basic points of the classical liberalism of the past centuries are the following points: 1) intelligent people should have unconditional personal, political and economic rights independent of the state; 2) there must be a system in the state that promotes justice and limits the state itself; 3) all people have the right to form a state and influences it.

In the Shadow of the “Indeterminate Speech-Act”: The Populist Politics of Rumor in Fritz Lang’s Early Sound Films

Based on Gilles Deleuze’s claim that rumor has been a “cinematographically privileged object” in early sound cinema, this essay will provide a political analysis of the representation of rumor in two early sound films in the transnational oeuvre of Fritz Lang. This interpretation of M―Eine Stadt sucht einen Morder (Germany, 1931) and Lang’s first Hollywood production Fury (USA, 1936) will show that the shift from silent to sound cinema marks not only an aesthetic and technological innovation, but also coincides with an increased political awareness in the director’s oeuvre. While his films of the silent era remain politically ambiguous and have often been accused of foreshadowing fascist themes and aesthetics, the sound films produced shortly before and after Lang’s emigration to the United States take a clear political stand with regards to the toxic effects of rumors as expressions of populist sentiments and, in this, provide a gateway to the director’s integration into American liberalism.

Ludwig von Mises and Classical Liberalism

In studying the development of western freedoms, perhaps no subject is more worthy of discussion than classical liberalism, which the late historian Ralph Raico wrote was “the signature political philosophy of Western Civilization.” Raico defined classical liberalism as “the ideology advocating private property, an unhampered market economy, the rule of law, constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion and of the press, and international peace based on free trade.” This ideology arose in the Middle Ages, came alive in the 16th and 17th centuries, declined at the end of the 19th century, and was reborn in the 20th century largely at the hands of one remarkable man—the Austrian-born economist and historian Ludwig von Mises. Through a reasoned and investigated reconstruction of primary sources, this paper will catalog the ideas and achievements of Ludwig von Mises to demonstrate that he was the critical intellectual link in the continuation of the classical liberal tradition. This was the case in both a chronological sense (by connecting the ideas of 17th and 18th-century thinkers through its decline in the late 19th and early 20th century to later 20th-century classical liberals such as F.A. Hayek) and in a geographical sense (by transmitting the classical liberal ideas that had primarily been developed in Europe to the United States in the 20th century). Mises was responsible for the renaissance of classical liberalism in the United States and the birth of the modern-day libertarian movement. Mises’s life work was a full-throated defense of classical liberalism, to include free-market economics, private property, and anti-imperialism.

A Study on Model Development of Liberal Arts College through American Liberal Arts Colleges

A Study on Model Development of Liberal Arts College through American Liberal Arts Colleges

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (Alan Ryan)

John Dewey and the High Tide of American Liberalism (Alan Ryan)

Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

<i>Land of Tomorrow: Postwar Fiction and the Crisis of American Liberalism</i>. Benjamin Mangrum. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. x+203.

Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform by Marilyn Lake

Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform by Marilyn Lake

Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism

Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism

Postcritical Howells: American Realism and Liberal Guilt

Abstract This essay explores the concept of liberal guilt in William Dean Howells’s fiction, focusing especially on his 1888 novel Annie Kilburn. Genealogies of liberal guilt rarely mention Howells, and yet no American writer has more painstakingly elaborated the embarrassing predicament of middle-class complicity in social arrangements that entail the widespread suffering of others. I provide a summary of theoretical positions on liberal guilt as a structure of feeling that entails what Richard Rorty calls “doubt about [one’s] own sensitivity to the pain and humiliation of others, doubt that present institutional arrangements are adequate to deal with this pain and humiliation.” Howells felt these doubts profoundly, and yet he understood liberal guilt as a productive emotional and intellectual predicament. Put simply, Howells viewed liberal guilt, like realism itself, as an attitude of resigned acceptance of persistent social injustices but an attitude capable of animating, rather than dissipating, liberal commitments and public agendas.

1960년대 미국 선교사에 의한 한국기독학생운동의 세계교회와의 연대 기반 구축 — 제임스 레이니(James T. Laney)의 한국 활동을 중심으로 —

In the 1970s, Korean Christian students led the Korean democratic movement. This central role was primarily attributed to James T. Laney, who was sent to Korea by the WSCF in the late 1950s. This article examines how Laney was able to build that foundation. After the mid-1950s, when the US and the Soviet Union competitively provided economic assistance to the Third World, the WCC, like the US government, began to implement its Third World mission strategy more aggressively. Amid these changes in the international order system, WSCF designed the LMC project in 1956. It was a college-centered academic ecumenical strategy. Future leaders of WCC and IMC led WSCF. Therefore, WSCF’s Third World mission strategy was consistent with the WCC’s mission strategy. Laney was sent as part of the Third World Mission Strategy of the World Church. After his visit to Korea, he introduced Walt W. Rostow’s theory of modernization, which is the direction of US’s Third World foreign policy, and played a leading role in helping future Christian leaders in Korea move in that direction. According to the ‘modernization theory’ of Rostow, many social problems arise when the Third World moves from traditional to modern society. Communists will intervene at this time, and the US predicts a need to prevent it. The solution was to have each part of the Third World deal with this problem on its own. Laney from WSCF played a role in Korea. In other words, Christians solved labor and urban slums that could be social issues when the economy grew. Laney trained Korean Christian students by unifying the Korean Christian Student Movement organization, which was distributed according to WSCF’s LMC project, and running various social problem programs. And he connected them with the world church organization, laying the groundwork for worldwide solidarity of anti-communism. Laney’s activities began to pay off in the 1960s when the Korean economy grew and gradually entered the modern world. Laney’s Christian students were encouraged to go to the labor and urban slum areas, centering on the unified Christian student movement organization, to guide them in the direction of modernization. Laney has formed personal connections in Korea through his activities in Korea. Laney’s actions in Korea, as part of the Third World Mission Strategy by the WCC, WSCF, and the American Church, resulted in the creation, expansion, and consolidation of forces in support of American liberals in Korea. This history has continued in Korea and the United States through Christianity to this day.

The Party of Reform in the Doldrums: The Convergence of Anglo-American Political Progressivism

In September 1955, John Kenneth Galbraith encountered British Labour Party MP Richard Crossman at a conference hall in Milan, Italy. They went there with a clear mission: to defend their parties’ achievements from expected attacks by Friedrich Hayek and other “reactionaries” at the conference. In public, they confidently boasted about the records of the Democratic and Labour governments in prosperity, full employment, and social and welfare programs during the past decades. In private talks, however, they were less confident—and more candid. “Both the American liberal and the British socialist in the 1930s,” said Galbraith to Crossman, “assumed that capitalism was not only immoral but unworkable; it was a system which must destroy itself because of its own inherent weaknesses.” But if this assumption were not true, he asked, “would that not mean the snapping of the mainspring of the Labour Party?” Crossman instantly got the point. The clothes of American liberals were “stolen by the Eisenhower Republicans, just as ours [were] by the Butlerites,” confessed the Labour MP. The task of reforming capitalism, which had been the raison d’être of the “party of reform” of both countries, lost its urgency. An era of reform had been replaced by an era of moderation. And in this new era, their parties were clearly on the losing side—and would continue to lose until they could find a new cause to fight.

The Woman of Tomorrow

Pablo A. Ramirez, “The Woman of Tomorrow: Gertrude Atherton and the Latina Foremother of the Californian New Woman” (pp. 502–534) Throughout the 1890s, Gertrude Atherton employs the figure of the aristocratic Californiana (Mexican Californian woman) to extend classical liberalism’s economic model of individualism to include women. By joining the aristocratic Californiana with American liberalism, Atherton transforms California’s history of capitalist development into a romance in which the creation of new markets generates not only profits, but the New Woman as well. In Atherton’s stories of Alta California, which I call “tales of romantic liberalism,” the history and evolution of California and the New Woman is narrated through the promises (or contracts) that a Californiana character makes and the obligations she accepts or rejects. The Californiana in The Doomswoman (1893) and Before the Gringo Came (1894) becomes the foundation for the New Woman, whose personal development and advancement promises to perfect liberal capitalism through her consensual romantic unions. As the decade drew to a close and the war with Spain became imminent, however, one can see in Atherton’s The Californians (1898) her growing fear that the massification of politics and culture imperiled not only liberal capitalism and democracy, but the evolution of women’s individuality as well. As a result, the evolution of the Californiana character is no longer reliant on a union with a capitalist contractarian partner but on the reaffirmation of her aristocratic individualism. Through her Californiana heroines, Atherton engages the Californio past in order to imagine the evolution of women’s individuality as the United States undergoes a shift from classical liberalism to modern liberalism and from republic to overseas empire.

Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism

Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism

The Battle over Burke

Like Karl Marx, Edmund Burke has remained a partisan figure, even though the specific partisan context in which he wrote is long gone. To a greater degree than Marx, however, Burke's partisan identity is itself frequently contested. Burke was a hero to the conservative writer Russell Kirk, who devoted his life to undoing the triumphs of twentieth-century American progressivism. But Burke was also a hero to Woodrow Wilson—whose presidency enacted and inspired so many of the progressive reforms that Kirk wanted to overturn—and to a number of the Victorian liberals who did so much to form Wilson's political mind-set.

Image of Russian Revolution in American Radical Discourse: the Russia’s Social Mission vs the US Liberal Mission

Image of Russian Revolution in American Radical Discourse: the Russia’s Social Mission vs the US Liberal Mission

Faith in Beauty and Progress: Temple Beth El

ABSTRACT In the 1920s Harrisburg's acculturated Reform and Conservative Jews found in City Beautiful aesthetics and ideals the architecture and ideology appropriate for expressing publicly their cultural identity as thoroughly modern Americans and Jews. Temple Beth El and Temple Ohev Sholom, both built on Front Street in uptown Harrisburg, stand as the ultimate material outcome and testimony to the synergistic interweaving of early twentieth century American and Jewish progressivism. A book commemorating Temple Beth El's 1928 dedication, produced by J. Horace McFarland's Mount Pleasant Press in 1930, documents in word and image connections between the founding of the congregation, the building of its temple, and the sensibilities and goals of the City Beautiful movement.