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This introductory chapter briefly presents some new perspectives on Garveyism. Though commonly recognized as one of the most important phenomena in the history of the African diaspora, observers of the Garvey phenomenon often struggle to explain it. This chapter (and the book as a whole) attempt to fill in the gaps in Garvey scholarship by characterizing Garveyism as a method of organic mass politics, in which “process” was privileged over “stance”; and a sustained project of diasporic identity building, where “race” according to Marcus Mosiah Garvey was a fixed signifier, connecting peoples of African descent to a single, ancient history, and guiding them to a common destiny. To conclude, the chapter discusses the structure and approach this volume will undertake in studying Garvey.

This chapter examines Dwight D. Eisenhower's legacy in the area of liberal democratic internationalism during the period 1953–1977. Until 1947, the American foreign policy choice had been between a Wilsonian advocacy of democracy and a Rooseveltian preference for nonintervention. A third option had emerged since then: intervention for dictatorships, even against indigenous political forces that might be seeking to create constitutional, democratic regimes. The chapter first provides an overview of American realism and mass politics in the twentieth century, with emphasis on the modernity of fascism, communism, and democracy, before discussing American foreign policy during the Eisenhower years. In particular, it considers the Eisenhower administration's policy decisions with respect to Iran, Guatemala, and Vietnam. It also explores the geopolitical realism of American support for democratic governments abroad.

This chapter examines the extent of Garveyism's global reach in the aftermath of World War I. It looks at how the spread of radical Garveyism transcended its West Indian skeleton, enlivening the dreams of black men and women throughout the Americas and Africa, projecting a dazzling interpretation of world events and scriptural destiny that built on and paid respect to rich histories of struggle while plotting a new future and a new identity—a New Negro. Radical Garveyism urgently articulated a moment in which the outlines of the postwar world were uncertain, and in which peoples of African descent sensed an opportunity to redraw them. Its dramatic reception both explained a moment of global mass politics and catalyzed new and often explosive expressions of dissent.

This chapter discusses the implications of the revisionist portrait of Southern politics introduced in the previous chapters. It begins by considering how much the South has changed since the dismantlement of the one-party system. It also examines the qualitative distinction between the status of blacks and whites in the Jim Crow South. Southern members of Congress (MCs) could not ignore whites' preferences the way they did blacks', a fact with important implications for their behavior in office and, indirectly, for the course of American political development. The chapter then explores this book's implications for our understanding of American political development, of mass politics in authoritarian regimes, and of the role of parties in democracy. After all, just because the one-party South was not itself a democracy does not mean that we cannot learn something about democracy from studying it. Chief among the lessons here is the claim that a multiparty system—and specifically, partisan electoral competition—is a necessary condition for democracy.

This chapter explores racial politics during the First World War, which acted as a catalyst in which old and richly drawn contests of authority and power were shifted on their axis, disrupted, and transformed. From the ascendant black capital of Harlem, a militant “New Negro” movement had emerged, its proponents hoping to more dramatically leverage the “new theater” created by the war to reshape global relations of race and class inequality, to celebrate militant and respectable black masculinity, and to replace an old cadre of elitist and ineffectual black leadership with a new brand of uncompromising mass politics. Joining the stream of West Indians heading for New York, Marcus Garvey was a fortunate witness to the birth of the New Negro movement. By the end of the war, thoughts of returning to Jamaica forgotten, he had begun to pull the movement's center of gravity toward himself and his organization.

This chapter demonstrates that radical political movements on left and right invested even more heavily — rhetorically and pragmatically — in the mobilizing potential of sport and physical culture in the heightened atmosphere of crisis in the mid- to late 1930s. Distinctions between mass politics and mass (physical) culture often collapsed entirely as sports stadia were used across the political spectrum as sites for mass political expression. A considerable part of this chapter is devoted to the highly significant but under-researched sport and physical education society (SPES) in the radical rightist Croix de Feu/PSF. Here and elsewhere the chapter interrogates not only how such movements continued to use athletic manliness as a tool of popular political mobilization, but also how far these factions themselves took part in the public conversation about male bodily decline, biological degeneration, and its correction through socially hygienic physical exercise.

This Prologue sums up the vast upheavals accompanying the turn of the century, featuring the fate of empires and diplomatic relations between European powers and the US, but also the ‘arrival of the masses on to the stage of history’, the impact of the electrical revolution (cinema, X-rays, the electron), the great fairs in Europe and the US, the tremendous sense of novelty, energy, dynamism pulsating across the Atlantic, but coming overwhelmingly from swelling America.

To contextualize Labor Politics in Latin America’s country-specific discussions of Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela, this chapter provides the historical and comparative background essential to account for the particular ways in which global and regional transformations affected labor and labor legislation in Latin America during the critical 1990s and their aftermath in the new century. In the development of this background, the author also explores key concepts that are essential to understanding the book’s case studies. Starting with early experiments in working-class organization, the chapter revisits the contours of mass politics and labor movements in the region and their reconfiguration starting in the 1980s that so deeply transformed the conditions under which workers had struggled to advance and protect their rights.

This chapter tackles the issue of how academic, business, government, and media specialists understood secular mass politics in the Middle East and focus specifically on interpretations of Turkish, Arab, and Iranian nationalist movements. Members of the nascent network first wrestled with the issue in the years between the end of World War I and the end of World War II, when they identified two different types of nationalist movement in the region. According to their analyses, the first type of movement emerged from the actions of particularly powerful individual leaders, such as Mustafa Kemal in Turkey, Reza Khan in Iran, and 'Abd al-'Aziz Ibn Sa'ud in the Arabian Peninsula. The second, defined most effectively in George Antonius's The Arab Awakening, was understood to be the product of a growing middle- and upper-class anticolonial and intellectual movement.

This chapter explores Nietzsche and Mallarmé’s critical response to Wagner, where they articulate the two poles of the total work, the political and the spiritual, respectively. Both Mallarmé and Nietzsche affirm the absolute need of great art at the same time as they assert the primacy of “great poetry and thought” against the seductive power of music. Both are led through their agon with Wagner and the idea of the total work of art to confront the question of aesthetic illusion and to ponder the staging of the absolute in the age of aesthetics that is also the age of nihilism. Mallarmé’s grandiose idea of the Book as symbolist Mystery announces the avant-garde quest for a resacralized theatre; Nietzsche’s prophecy of the coming theatrical age of the political actor and the masses foreshadows the mass politics of the twentieth century.

Stefan Solomon shows Faulkner’s late novel as heavily influenced by cinematic representations of that particularly urban phenomenon: the crowd. Offering a variation on adaptation studies, Solomon sees A Fable’s depiction of a purposeful, politically motivated group (distinct from the more unruly nineteenth-century mob) as having origins in an unfilmed treatment Faulkner wrote in Hollywood in 1943 entitled “Who?” He shows the specular nature of movie audiences (or crowds) watching early film treatments of the same presence in various films as constitutive of a collective identity that went on to inform the twentieth century’s mass politics. Ultimately, Solomon avers, such progressive elements of both cinema and Faulkner’s novel are constrained by their opposite: an entrenched conservatism in both the film industry and the author.

This chapter reveals that Herbert C. Hoover was a “forgotten progressive.” In the 1970s, his place in American history was being reconceived by historians, who argued that Hoover was not the heartless and dogmatic conservative who waged relentless war against the New Deal. Trained as an engineer, widely traveled, and committed to scientific management, Hoover wanted to use knowledge to transcend class divisions and national rivalries without overextending the reach of government. Serving as an adviser to President Woodrow Wilson during World War I and orchestrating the distribution of relief after the conflict, he believed that the system of democratic capitalism was beleaguered by mass politics and the ideological appeal of rival systems of political economy. He wanted to safeguard the American way of life, the defining quality of which was individual opportunity. He believed that to achieve this goal he had to encourage businessmen, workers, and farmers to see that their interests could be served through voluntary cooperation.

The chapter follows Haya during a remarkable international saga during which he founded APRA as a transnational political party. Haya found himself at key locations during the global transition toward mass politics of the early twentieth century: Argentina following the university reform movement, post-revolutionary Mexico, post-revolutionary Russia, England during the rise of Laborism and Berlin during the rise of Nazism. He borrowed elements from each of these political movements to formulate Aprismo, a Marxist inspired anti-imperialist revolutionary ideology for Latin America. Haya believed that Latin America already had its own home-grown revolution, the Mexican Revolution, a model to be replicated in Peru and the rest of the continent

The mass politics emerging at the turn of the century brought a reconfiguration of liberal and conservative thought. As for the liberals, the possible directions of change seemed to involve either a move closer to the nationalists, or toward the socialists. The third option was to reject this alternative, creating a sort of liberal–conservative synthesis. Simultaneously, the conservatives also became conscious that the social transformation presented them with new dangers, but also with opportunities. One can identify two basic trajectories of change: integral nationalism connected elements of positivist, Social Darwinist, and neo-Romantic thought, while reform conservatism took some ideas from classical liberalism, mixing it with the social reformism of the German Katheder-Sozialisten. However, neither the liberals nor the conservatives managed to retain their intellectual dominance and their political survival eventually depended mostly on their willingness to assume a radical nationalist position, which in many ways contradicted their ideological heritage.

The conclusion argues that whereas most historiography has seen May Fourth as a point of transition whose political importance is in introducing Marxist concepts, it is a transitional point in political practices. The conclusion proposes that in the wake of May Fourth intellectuals positioned themselves as brokers of political legitimacy situated between holders of political power on the one hand and the masses on the other. As such they had a key position in the emergent politics of mass parties. A brief denouement follows Yun Daiying’s life as a political activist till his arrest and execution in 1931 and suggests how his subsequent commemoration reflects political and cultural changes in China.

Chapter 7 investigates the feedback effects of federal higher education policies on women’s capacity and inclination to participate in politics. This analysis suggests that federal student aid programs have played a role in the declining gender gap in political engagement that we have seen in the last fifty years. By providing valuable resources that significantly increase the probability that beneficiaries will attain higher levels of education, broad-reaching financial aid policies have contributed to significant increases in women’s political interest, political efficacy, and involvement in political activities. Not only do federal higher education policies help to realize the promise of full and equal citizenship by promoting political engagement among a group that has traditionally been underrepresented in mass politics, but also they provide lessons for how the state can successfully use social policy to promote equality in terms of political citizenship.