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Constructs an explanation of welfare state development in the U.S. from analysis of segmentalism and cartelism, analyzed in earlier chapters, which characterized key components of its labor market system. Segmentalists (implicitly) and cartelists (explicitly) contracted with workers to hold wages and benefits higher than what market mechanisms alone would have set them; thus, these employers were vulnerable to the deflationary macroeconomic shock and unemployment of the Great Depression, which allowed competitors to threaten their profits by more freely lowering wages and therefore charging lower prices. New Dealers, having learned from the Progressive era as well as more recent reform about the potential for capitalist support ignored vocal opposition from business organizations and proceeded with regulatory social security, unemployment insurance, minimum wage, and labor law reform that would level the competitive playing field upward, stabilizing ruinous competition for cartelists and segmentalists, and thereby securing a cross‐class alliance for the New Deal.

Recounts the climax in the House of Representatives over constitutional revision. (In Japan's new democratic dispensation, the popularly elected lower house had controlling power.) Ch. 18 tells how the two major parties in the conservative governing coalition (Liberals and Progressive Democrats) became actively involved in negotiations over the exact terms of Article 9, renouncing war and armed forces, and the disposition of imperial property. It also recounts how Colonel Kades, somewhat reluctantly, brought forward several amendments demanded by the Allied member‐nations on the Far Eastern Commission, including one providing that only “civilians” could serve in the cabinet. Finally, it summarizes the proceedings of Saturday, August 24, a time for soaring eloquence and the final vote in the House of Representatives.

Ernie Lieberman grew up in the midst of the folk revival that took place during the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. This chapter describes how folk music came to be important to the American left, the issues on which they focused (union organizing, racial and gender equality, peace), and Lieberman's own participation in the movement. As a child in the 1930s, he admired Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and sang folk and protest songs at summer camp, Progressive party conventions, and on tours for the Civil Rights Congress. In the 1950s, he performed and recorded albums with the first interracial folk group, and later, as political folk music began to reach a wider audience, became a songwriter.

This chapter examines three important strands of progressive thought in the late nineteenth century to reveal the tensions between ideas about progress, religion, and science, and resulting predictions about America's religious future. This chapter first delineates a populist‐secular group of thinkers, exemplified by Robert Ingersoll, “the great agnostic” proponent of freethinking, whose prophecies blended the older jeremiad form with a heightened emphasis on atheistical science and Enlightment rationality. The second strand of thought explored in this chapter came from the ranks of progressive intellectuals, represented in part by the powerful pragmatic philosophy of religion developed by William James in his book, Varieties of Religious Experience. Finally, this chapter argues for a third diverse group comprised largely of ministers and social gospel activists, such as Walter Rauschenbusch, who attempted to reform the nation along explicitly Christian lines.

This chapter continues the analysis of party collapse by focussing in detail on three cases of collapse at the national level in democracies. These involved the Whig party in the US (1850s), the British Liberal party (early 20th century), and the Canadian Progressive Conservatives (1990s). Popular academic arguments that the American and British cases can be explained by reference to electoral realignment are rejected. In all three cases it was having two fight different sources of opposition that were eroding their strength at the same time that caused collapse. Strategies normally available to party elites in combating collapse could not be applied successfully here because of the dual nature of the crises. Finally, it is questioned whether conditions now make party management of their environments, to ward off potential collapse, more difficult; while this argument is rejected it is argued that they favour the development of less ‘pure’ forms of two-partism.

This chapter examines the English Progressive, concentrating upon the issues surrounding what David Dowty (1977) dubbed the ‘imperfective paradox’. The discussion concerns a single part of the general problem of tense and aspect, both within languages and cross-linguistically. That general problem has three pieces, namely: (i) what is the interpretation of tense and aspect?; (ii) what is the nature of the syntactic structures to be interpreted?; and (iii) what are the principles through which the mapping from these structures to the meaning is effected? None of these pieces can be assumed in advance: all must be solved simultaneously.

This chapter discusses the controversy generated by the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's decision to extend reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in higher education. It looks at two issues that have dominated Indian policy debates with regards to reservations for OBCs. The first issue is about whether caste is an indicator of disadvantage, while the second issue pertains to the conception of backwardness. The chapter shows that many issues still remain unresolved, such as the position of the more affluent segments and the position of minorities.

This chapter looks at how the physicians mobilized against the proposals for government health insurance. This period of mobilization was from the Progressive Era to the 1950s. The chapter starts with a study of the campaign for compulsory health insurance, which was introduced during the Progressive Era and revived in 1929. It then examines the national health insurance during the postwar era and the conflict between the national health insurance campaign of the Truman administration and the Medical Lobby. The chapter also discusses the available subsidy for insurers.

This chapter shows how the progressive women's communities emerged during the Progressive Era. Galveston supplied an environment conducive to middle and upper-class women's advancement from congregational life into community activism. It helped extend women's issues to public forums. Three progressive communities emerged: African American Women's Hospital Aid Society, the Women's Progressive Club, and the Negro Women Voters' League. They all had nurtured ameliorative and reforming sentiments. These associations were separated by race but their goals advanced women to positions of leadership. Thus, the first two decades became women's decades as they organized to protect the health, seek equal rights and opportunities for women and combat discrimination. It worked for a healthier, safer urban environment for the women.

This chapter examines the views of British Progressives at the start of the 20th century. The period saw the arrival of a new complicating development that revitalized the old debate about whether India could develop along Western lines. The focus is on Progressive opinion because it was only among those who believed that India couldachieve home rule, rather than among those who believed that it could not, that serious debate about the necessary preconditioning of political freedom occurred. The chapter examines the impressions of British Progressives who visited India in the years after the renewal of nationalist agitation. These are J. Keir Hardie in 1907, H. W. Nevinson in 1907-8, J. Ramsay MacDonald in 1909, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1911.

This chapter situates Minnie Fisher Cunningham in the voluntary association culture of the Progressive Era, and traces her emergence as an activist and social reformer in Galveston in the 1910s. Through voluntary associations such as women's clubs and civic organizations, Cunningham and other urban middle-class women invented new roles for themselves as child welfare advocates and municipal housekeepers. Defining the city as an extension of the home and using maternalist rhetoric to deflect male criticism, they shaped a female public culture that was the precondition for the emergence of a broad-based woman suffrage movement. Cunningham followed the path from clubwoman and civic activist to suffragist, serving as president of the Galveston Equal Suffrage Association, and as a travelling organizer for the state suffrage association, which elected her as president in 1915.

This chapter discusses methodology and places the book in the context of related scholarship on the subject. In particular, it takes issue with literary scholarship whose approach is based on a history of ideas or discourses and thus eschews attention to authors' biographies, or experiences of authors — and thus ultimately ignores historical experiences.(It addresses Walter Michaels' Our America, which is an influential example of such scholarship that addresses modernist novels and their relationship to 1920s nativism.) The chapter also argues with studies of the relationship between modernist style and politics that give attention to stylistics per se, apart from plot and character. It discusses the common plot that unifies the 1920s novels at issue, discusses why critics have missed this plot, and offers an alternative argument about modernist style in the context of modernist plots and characters, as well as the historical context of the mobilization. In so doing, it traces the deconstruction of the sentimental novel of seduction by Progressive Era realist writers and the rise of the modernist, racist promiscuity plot, which the three 1920s novels at issue here share with each other, and with Djuna Barnes' Nightwood and Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust.

The historical and cultural forces pushing together traditional Cajun, hillbilly, western swing, jazz, and American popular music, and the musical synthesis that ensued, form the foundation of this chapter. Cajun swing embodied the growing popularity and availability of mass media. Cultural shifts also acted on the burgeoning style. The petroleum industry, compulsory English-only education, the disruptive effects of the 1927 flood, new roads, automobiles, and two world wars exposed rural Cajuns to a larger reality, while plugging the ethnic group into the pulse of American popular culture at an unprecedented pace. Disposable incomes generated by opportunities in the oil patch augmented the stratification of Cajun society and facilitated the acquisition of technological amenities—particularly phonographs, records, and radios. America was open to the Cajun community for those who opted to avail themselves of the opportunities this access afforded.

This chapter describes the context in which the Progressive campaign for protective laws arose, assessing reformers' rationales and the oppositions they faced. Passage of the 1893 Illinois law marked the start of the Progressive Era campaign for protective labor laws. Through law, reformers hoped to impose standards on factories and improve the lives of industrial workers. Resistance to laws that affected men—from courts, legislators, unions, and public opinion—made protective laws for women and children imperative; reformers hoped that they would provide precedents for more “general” laws. Thus, single-sex laws became a crucial link in protectionist plans. The campaign for protective laws involved a range of supporters but rested largely on a dynamic organization, the National Consumers' League (NCL), and its determined leader, Florence Kelley (1859–1932), and the small group of activists that shaped its development.

This introductory chapter describes the main themes of the book, placing them within the context of the scientific and cultural milieu from which the eugenics movement and its religious supporters emerged. It describes the science of eugenics and its founder, Francis Galton, and the 19th century scientific discoveries upon which the eugenics movement would build, including Darwinian evolutionary theory and Lamarckianism, as well as a brief overview of the conflict between religion and science, as exemplified in the work of John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. The chapter also discusses the influence of the Progressive Movement on American culture in the early 20th century, and an overview of liberal and modernist Protestantism, Reform Judaism, and liberal Catholicism.

This chapter further places religious leaders’ enthusiasm for eugenics in the context of both Progressivism and the Social Gospel movement. As eugenic ideas gained in popularity, religious leaders such as Rev. Walter Taylor Sumner, a Protestant Episcopal Dean in Chicago, began crafting their own eugenic proposals, which they administered in their churches. Dean Sumner’s eugenic “marriage health certificate” plan garnered publicity and many imitators. This chapter describes such proposals and places them in the context of the growing social service movement in the Protestant churches in particular, and the public’s increasing interest in eugenics in general. It also discusses the many “eugenic family studies” published in the 1910s.

This chapter is situated within the framework of the “Green Atlantic” and its relationship to socialism and black nationalism. New York City became a world capital of insurgent movements during and after the Great War. The experience of Irish nationalists in New York during this critical decade in Ireland's history—above all, the experience of the Irish Progressive League—further complicates the narrative of Ireland as “sacra insula” and of Irish emigrants as narrowly conservative. The Irish Progressive League, played a critical role in launching one of the most remarkable episodes of Ireland's war for independence—the Irish Patriotic Strike, which took place in New York Harbor for three weeks in August and September 1920. It was a rare moment—when Green and Black came together in a common struggle—but it was followed by Eamon de Valera's public lament that “Ireland is now the last white nation that is deprived of its liberty.”

This chapter illustrates how Friedrich Hayek began to develop an intellectual and organizational strategy to protect and maintain “the free society” as World War II drew to an end. His strategy looked to the influence of the early twentieth-century American progressives and British Fabian socialists and argued that defenders of liberty would have to develop a similar organizational and intellectual strategy. The result of Hayek's efforts was that a sympathetic group of intellectuals from Paris, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, Manchester, the LSE, and Chicago came together under his leadership to form a kind of neoliberal international. The group called itself the Mont Pelerin Society after the venue of its first meeting, which was held in Vevey, Switzerland.