Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us)

Social historian Tichi makes the case that there are widespread parallels between the excesses and inequities of the country's first Gilded Age over a century ago and the lopsided social and economic landscape of our day. In a lively spur to reform-minded discussion, Tichi offers profiles of seven Victorian-era reformers—including an industrial health advocate (Alice Hamilton), antilynching crusader (Ida B. Wells-Barnett), consumer advocate (Florence Kelley), jurist (Louis Brandeis) and child welfare advocate (Julia Lathrop)—selected for how they typified a generational commitment to “fresh thinking and action.” And their deeds—eloquently channeled here—do resound with renewed import now. Often from the privileged middle classes themselves—Wells-Barnett being a notable exception—these men and women fought tirelessly to better the lives of working people in a country revamped by sprawling corporate might, industrial organization, endemic prejudice and the concomitant intellectual rationales of Social Darwinism. Many lives were saved and improved as a result, though the system arguably remained fundamentally unchanged. Hamilton, at the end of her long and distinguished life—a few months shy of the passage of OSHA—nevertheless pessimistically bemoaned an “instinctive American lawlessness.” (Nov.)