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Reform Workshop:
REFORM MOVEMENTS IN AMERICAN HISTORY:
A VERY ROUGH TIMELINE
Most of my teaching directly on American reform movements treats
the period from 1789 to 1919, as you will see from my sample syllabus.
My publications cover an even narrower time span, 1815 - 1865. I do, however,
incorporate discussions of reform movements into my teaching of other
subjects in twenteth-century American history. Here is a very, very rough
list of what I cover, with some comments about issues and themes.
BEFORE 1815:
My major point is that there are very few reform movements
in the sense of organized efforts to improve society, although individual
Quakers and others were active critics of slavery. Equally striking,
there are few reformers and with exception of the Quakers I have in
mind, most are occasional do-gooders like Ben Franklin or the Boston
minister, Cotton Mather. It is not until around 1830 that we begin to
see professional reformers, men and women who make reform a full-time
career. Why? My short answer is that until the late eighteenth century
most Americans didn’t think the world could be improved very much
by human effort. It took an intellectual reorientation, as well as improved
printing and transportation technologies, to create the flowering of
reform that began around 1815 and continued through the Civil War.
1815 TO 1865:
This is the period covered in my book, American Reformers,
and I emphasize the variety and range of reform movements within it,
as well as links between them. Many abolitionists, for example, were
also against alcohol, for women’s rights, against war, and for
health reform. My major focus is on why this period provided such extraordinarily
rich material for reform and radical movements, as well as utopian cults.
I also address the question of how different reformers were from their
contemporaries, a matter I address in the readings and will talk about
in the workshop.
1865 - 1890:
Reconstruction looms large over this period, but I also deal
with what I see as a major shift among reformers. Antebellum ones were
often utopian in hoping for a perfect society on earth and believed
that change began with individuals. After the war reformers often scaled
down and narrowed their goals. They also placed greater faith in institutions
to effect change. This narrowing in the campaign for women’s rights.
Before the War advocates often called for equal rights for women in
a number of different realms of life. After the War they focused on
getting the vote. In treating this time period I also raise the question
of whether or not movements we do not like qualify as reform movements.
My case in point is Eugenics, also a matter for discussion in the workshop.
Finally, the Temperance movement—really several different movements—runs
throughout my discussions of this period, as well as the one before
and after. It changes dramatically over the course of the nineteenth
century and in ways that are very instructive about how reform movements
adapt, change tactics, and find new constituencies. It is, moreover,
the longest-lived and largest reform movement of the nineteenth century.
1880 - 1919:
I go back a decade and talk about the emergence of genuinely
radical groups—anarchists, socialists, and communists—and
note that until the Red Scare of 1919 mainstream Americans were often
willing to tolerate, even pay attention, to ideologies they would pretty
much eliminate from public discourse afterward. Populism in the 1890s
also merits attention, both as a revolt of farmers, with some radical
proposals, and for occasional attempts to build alliances between blacks
and whites at a time when segregation was taking shape. My own take
on Populism is a somewhat iconoclastic one: I see it as riddled with
contradictions, especially over the issue of what the government should
and should not do to help people. Black leaders like the two best-known,
W.E.B DuBois were also articulating important critiques of American
racism after 1890, as were lesser-known African American artists, intellectuals,
and religious leaders, including women. Progressivism, however, is the
largest presence in discussions of this period. I take apart its various
strands, often using Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt as exemplary
figures. Also important are ways in which Progressivism rose out of
the cities and states to become a national force. It further marks a
new willingness to use government and experts to set social policy.
1919 - 1929:
On the surface, this appears to be an interlude, a time of
disillusion among reformers and a moment when many intellectuals and
artists turned inward to put personal experience ahead of social change.
But interesting things were happening in African American communities,
such as the black nationalist movement of Marcus Garvey and the cultural
and political flowering known as the Harlem Renaissance. Behind the
over-all conservatism of the period, moreover, some political and other
leaders were formulating programs and ideas that would shape the New
Deal.
1929 -1970:
This is a long and rich period and I won’t try to summarize
all the topics I treat. What defines it as a unit, however, is the New
Deal and the line of Liberalism it created. As with Progressives, New
Deal Liberals saw the state as an instrument of social change and drew
heavily upon the advice of experts and professionals. In that sense,
they brought reform into the political system as part of the on-going
process of governing the nation. They had, of course, enemies on the
right and left whom I examine. Liberalism itself began to wane as a
political force during the Cold War, with a revival in the 1960s. At
that point, I talk about the Civil Rights Movement, the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations, a shift in youth culture from the “conformity”
of the 1950s to student radicalism in the 1960s, and—naturally—Vietnam.
1970 - Present:
The 1970s mark a turn away from collective action and toward
looking to changing one’s self rather than the world. That strand
is strong in feminism, which emerged as a major force in this decade,
and in a proliferation of popular health reform and self-help movements.
The decade also marks the beginning of the rise of a powerful Conservative
critique of Liberalism and of an Environmental movement that is a case
study of how diverse something can be and still be called a movement.
With both Neo-Conservatism and Environmentalism I raise two difficult
questions: 1) are we witnessing a fundamental rethinking of American
values and goals?; and, 2) are we seeing very different kinds of movements
for change than those of the nineteenth century, ones less dependent
on formal organizations, but quick to mobilize on particular issues
and heavily dependent on instantaneous communications? If I am in a
really malicious mood, I ask students a question I probably will pose
in the workshop: is Oprah Winfrey a movement?
Download the Ronald Walters Timeline
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