Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State - Tapa dura

Historians have been calling for years for syntheses of the new scholarship of the last generation. Dawley has now provided one...He dusts democracy off and places it back where it belongs, at the center of the story...His argument helps restore balance to our conception of "progressivism" and to our understanding of the larger liberal world of which, he reminds us, democratic impulses were once (and we must hope remain) a vital part.--Alan Brinkley "Times Literary Supplement " A superb book, much the best general account of 20th century American history to have been published in many years. It seems to be a model of the new approaches to American history, especially for the ways in which it combines social and political history. Dawley does more to make sense of the general theme of social justice, the defining theme of the past couple of generations, than anyone else. The book is superbly well written and effectively organized. It should become the leading college text in its subject, and I hope that it will also find a large general audience, for it will be of real interest to the learned public.--Stanley N. Katz "American Council of Learned Societies "

In a conceptualized interpretation of the making of modern America, prizewinning historian Alan Dawley traces the inner struggles of the nation's rise to power. Probing the dynamics of social change, he explores tensions between industrial workers and corporate capitalists, Victorian moralists and New Women, native Protestants and Catholic immigrants. Starting with the Gilded Age, "Struggles for Justice" highlights changes in American social and political life, including Wilson's liberal crusade, Hoover's managerial liberalism and Roosevelt's New Deal. Along the way, it presents a kaleidoscope of topics: expansion, unions, World War I, race relations, Red Scare and consumerism. Taking on the ever-changing tensions of state and society, Dawley makes social groups the major actors in protests against the reigning order and in the revisioning of America. Furthermore, by probing the many-sided contradictions of an expanding industrial society, he connects changes in gender roles to the new class relations of corporate capitalism and to new patterns of race and national identity. He also relates developments at home to the country's rapidly expanding imperial role abroad. Throughout Dawley's narrative, the central issue is the incompatibility between modern society and the existing liberal state. The story charts all efforts - radical, progressive, managerial, social - to align the state more closely with social realities. It explains how struggles between labourers and capitalists moved the country from laissez faire to the New Deal. It reaffirms the capacity of ordinary people to make history, along with leading groups. It provides new insights on issues in American life, such as the tensions between liberty and social responsibility, capitalism and democracy, the North and the South, social justice and state power.