PROTESTS FOR REFORM
Hesseltine, W. B.
Protests for Reform MIDWESTERN PROGRESSIVE POLITICS. A Historical Study of Its Origins and Development, 1870-1950, by Russel B. Nye. Michigan State College Press. 422 pp. $5. AGRICULTURAL...
...And, finally, they demonstrate that two wars each brought an end to "progressive" movements in both economics and politics...
...Taken together, they tell the story of the protest of America— the "most American" part of the United States—against the impact of the industrial revolution...
...The people moved in the darkness, chasing such will-o'-the-wisps as currency inflation, government ownership, state regulation, and an increased democratic control of the apparatus of the state...
...In economics, farmers' organizations sought for new agencies to combat the trusts, the railroads, and law-protected monopolies and to restore the farmer to his rightful place in the markets...
...Midwestern Progressive Politics is a superb synthesis of materials which have never before been brought together...
...Yet—let it be said in the second place—each of these volumes is good...
...University of Wisconsin Press...
...Salutos, Hicks, and Nye (each, incidentally, a Ph...
...D. from the University of Wisconsin) subject the Middle Western dissatisfaction to exhaustive exposition...
...In politics, the Westerners revolted, following the panaceas offered by Populism, Bry-anism, Progressivism, Wilsonianism, LaFolletteism, and New Dealism...
...Agricultural Discontent is a careful investigation of a series of organizations which had proposals for alleviating the plight of the farmer...
...When it does, students who hope to understand it will find these books indispensable...
...In consequence, both of these volumes end on a note of pessimism and despair...
...But a political swami might well predict that, since the economic problems of the Middle West remain unsolved, .agricultural discontent, with both its economic and its political manifestations, will rise again...
...Russel Nye's story of Midwestern politics has little news in it...
...Yoked in an unequal alliance with the South, the Pacific Coast, and the Atlantic seaboard, the Middle West has voiced its protest and formulated its program both in a series of farm movements, and in a succession of political revolts...
...First, both books furnish the clear evidence that a Farmer-Labor Party —the darling of arm-chair "liberal" pundits—is an absurd mixture of incompatible interests...
...581 pp...
...From these two studies, several items emerge as worthy of attention...
...It tells a familiar tale of political disturbances from the Grangers in the 1870's and Populists in the '80s to the election of Truman in 1948...
...AGRICULTURAL DISCONTENT IN THE MIDDLE WEST, 1900-1939, by Theodore Salutos and John D. Hicks...
...6.75...
...Salutos and Hicks' book, on the other hand, is a detailed, fact-laden examination of farmers' movements from the Society of Equity in the first years of the 20th Century through the farmers Union, the Farm Bureau, and the Farm Bloc to the agricultural panaceas of the New Deal...
...Let it be said in the beginning that there are great differences in the quality of these two books...
...However, after a couple of chapters by Hicks which define the "western Middle West" (Wisconsin, parts of Illinois, and the trans-Mississippi area), survey the background of western-Middle Western conditions, Agricultural Discontent is as dull as ditch water—and as slow moving...
...And third, they serve to suggest that the remedy lies in cooperatives, decentralization, and a greater democracy rather than in "aid" from the federal government...
...The railroads, banks, tariffs for industry, and the national monetary policy exploited the Middle West for the benefit of the East...
...The farmers tried cooperatives, state owned grain elevators, state insurance schemes, farm holidays, and a succession of devices for "equalizing" the benefits which the protective tariff gave the industrialists...
...It is based on little new research, and has little fresh interpretation...
...One is an important reference book...
...the other is a brilliant summary of a significant political movement...
...It is based on an intensive reading of farm papers, government reports, and the manuscripts and publications of farmers' organizations...
...Reviewed by William B. Hesseltine THE regional nature of American life—the fact that the United States is, in reality, a series of superficially united regions with wide fundamental divergencies—is excellently illustrated by these two books on Middle-Western discontent...
...Second, they demonstrate that wars, hot and cold, serve as temporary palliatives, but that the ills from which the heart of America suffers are still uncured...
...In contrast, Midwestern Progressive Politics has a lively style, apt characterizations, a contagious enthusiasm, and a high literary finish...
Vol. 15 • October 1951 • No. 10
