Name: Pivotal Decades
ISBN: 9780393956559

John Cooper

John Milton Cooper

Argues that the first two decades of this century were a turning point in American history, and describes political, social, and economic changes during the period

The United States, 1900-1920

Pivotal Decades

Bryan Alexander

A solid history of the United States from 1900-1920, which I'm reading in my quest to study the American progressive movement. Pivotal Decades is very readable, well organized. A nice mix of narrative and analysis. The biases (pro-Wilson, very liberal-centrist) are interesting as well(see below).

There's an awful lot to comment on here, given the richness of the subject and how much material Cooper manages to work in. Let me pull out some bits I found fascinating:

-The huge political and economic power of the Northeast. 
-The birth of the term "progressive" (161)
-Muckracking boomed then stopped, lasting only about 5 years, 1902-1907 or so (89)
-Both voter participation and US birth rate failed to grow in this period (1, 253, 372).
-Economic inequality seems to have built up in this period, laying the groundwork for the 1920s (82-3)
-White racism against blacks (and other races) ran deep: "one historian called [these decades] the 'nadir' for black Americans since the abolition of slavery" (71).
-Gifford Pinchot offers a fascinating example of an early Green, an environmentalist in power.
-Celebrity culture takes off in 1900-1920, focused on movie and sports stars (253, 293, 370)
-The AFL (American Federal of Labor) worked to get Americans supporting WWI and opposed women in the workforce (306, 308)
-Perhaps my favorite weird, even Gothic passage:
Other stories hinted that [president Wilson] had gone insane and that his wife and [doctor] Grayson were keeping him locked up. Bars that had been put up years before to protect windows from the Roosevelt boys' baseballs were cited as evidence that the White House was harboring a lunatic. (351)



Weaknesses of the book: one is its fierce love for Roosevelt and especially Wilson. Wilson emerges as a grand, if ultimately tragic hero by the end, and Cooper goes to some effort to minimize his problems. 

The book also suffers (from my perspective) by fighting hard to maintain a semi-Clintonian centrist viewpoint. So while Cooper celebrates the advances of women (this is the period where women finally win the vote), he avoids criticizing imperial adventures. Wilson, Taft, TR look just fine in this respect. Wilson's willingness to use force abroad before WWI is fascinating, and foreshadows much of the 20th century:
[Wilson and Secretary of State Bryan] actually extended the previous Republican administrations interventionist policies in the Caribbean and Central America" (224)

Cooper downplays the US invasion of several Soviet port cities during that civil war, insisting that Wilson was "reluctant" to do so, and did little. To his credit, Cooper at least refers to some of these policies, most spectacularly the Veracruz assault, as "fumbling" (224) and "bully[ing] weaker nations" (225)

Wilson's creation of an enormous power to fight WWI appears in a generally positive light. He launches the Selective Service Administration, an office to be dreaded two generations hence, and it even sparks a small armed rebellion. The draft succeeds in bringing up the bodies, despite being corrupt and marked by "subterfuges" (271) . The army "experimented with indoctrination programs" (281). Wilson's administration seized the railroads (290), set prices via the clearly named Price-Fixing Committee (291), created an "enforced patriotic conformity (294), and birthed a federal propaganda office, whose Orwellian titles was the Committee on Public Information (294). Cooper does blame Wilson for "smiling upon the antics of the CPI", criticizing him in a curiously weak way: "Wilson was failing at a task that he valued most and had once practiced best as a political leader: education of the public" (296). That said "education" slides quickly into propaganda seems obvious. Cooper also blames Wilson's staff for this, more than the man himself (297). 

Perhaps most notoriously the Wilson administration embarked on using "governmental coercion to stifle dissent" (287), a series of violations bad enough for Cooper to admit them as "a great failure for Wilson as a war leader, and... the ugliest blot on his record as president" (297). This is the administration which convinced a willing Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, not to mention the deliberately vague Espionage and Trading with the Enemy Acts. These were "the first institutional mechanisms by which the federal government could regulate freedom of expression" (300). The federal government censored publications, blocked one Congressman from taking his elected seat, and jailed presidential candidate Eugene Debs (check the war Cooper tries to defend Wilson on this (300). The Supreme Court issued its famous "clear and present danger" ruling against some free speech. Wilson's attorney general foments and rides the political waves of a Red Scare, jailing thousands and exiling many to the Soviet Union without due process. And the feds inspired states and localities to take their own steps to keep people in the war vein (301ff).

Similarly, Cooper uncritically lauds the huge growth in finance (255, 267, 276, 319), while often portraying unions as dangerously radical, and slighting left-wing figures. In fact, Cooper notes that "[a]t no time in American history was there greater tolerance and openness towards socialism than in 1910 and several years afterward" (146); Pivotal doesn't draw much attention to the way Democrats fought to exclude that challenge. When Wilson wins large numbers of industrial workers in the 1916 election, there's no sense in the text that he was competing with socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, and communists (255). In a telling passage Cooper has Wilson privately wanting to increase taxes on the rich, but being unable to do so because he needs "wealthy people... and the financial community to buy [war] bonds" (291-292).

While Cooper notes the persistence of white racism, its role in American life and politics is downplayed, especially when "race riots" look like evenly balanced matches, rather than, typically, exercises in white violence. Cooper quietly notes presidential racism ("The plight of black Americans also evoked little interest or disagreement from Roosevelt or Wilson" in 1912 (184)), Wilson muttering that wartime service made blacks too unruly "equal treatment overseas had 'gone to their heads'" (287), but doesn't follow up on this. The 1919 race riots (cf this book) - i.e, open and savage white violence against blacks - didn't "elicit any reaction from federal authorities" (331). On a global level, Cooper credits Wilson with sparking the end of European (but not American) colonialism, without a word about those colonized peoples' thoughts or actions (338).

I suspect this bias, what I'm thinking of as a liberal-centrist or centrist one, is the reason Prohibition doesn't receive much attention in the book, even though it grew into a powerful national force at the time. Embraced by many liberals and progressives, it became embarrassing after its failure, and something to be forgotten afterwards. Both conservatives and liberals supported Prohibition, in fact, as a fine exercise in bipartisanship. Listen to Cooper's description of that alliance:
Its vision of moral uplift contained roughly equal measures of evangelistic Protestant conformism and humanitarian impulses to improve health, safety, and family life. (128)


Related to Prohibition is Cooper's admiration for the expanded executive power grown by TR and Wilson. He criticizes abuses of power at times, but saves more words for bungled use of the executive. For example, Wilson's WWI buildup looks pretty good, organization, except for demobilization, for which the administration hadn't made any plans (!) (321). Wartime price fixing doesn't seem to be a problem, until ending it "triggered a severe recession" (322). Otherwise Pivotal Decades seems to bask in the presidency's powers, which helps us understand somewhat the appeal of the imperial presidency to liberals. Cooper mentions Wilson "scorn[ing] support from 'disloyal Americans' and appeal[ing] for 'one hundred percent Americanism'" (251) without a shudder. Ditto Wilson's "resorting to executive action to circumvent Congress" (263). This is where the broader progressive movement's focus on power comes in: "Progressives of various persuasions... welcomes opportunities to experiment with new forms of governmental economic and social intervention in civilian as well as military life" (287).

To his credit, Cooper turns critical during both TR's and Wilson's later careers. He implies that that great political strengths sometimes backfired, as when Wilson's fierce political partisanship (194) cost him the ability to be practically bipartisan (311ff). Wilson's very personal governing style, which apparently gave him diplomatic and domestic success, led him to "declin[e] to involve himself in debates during 1919 over economic reform, labor conflict, race relations, prohibition, or civil liberties" (330) - i.e., to participate in much of American political life. 

At a different level there are some curious statements which appear to contradict each other, or what I know of history. Cooper credits the US entry into war with turning WWI into a "genuine world war" (268), even though fighting had been deeply multicontinental since 1915. The book deems the Federal Reserve to be part of the government, a public institution (197-198) but also mentions it acting independently, against the government, without sanction (292). Cooper thinks the possibility of any European communist rising after 1917 to be "pipedreams" (303), then mentions communist revolutions and actual rule in Germany and Hungary (325). It's hard to say that Wilson's Fourteen Points don't mean ending the Austria-Hungarian empire, given their support of the freedom and autonomy of little nations (316).

I have dwelled on my criticism in this review, but don't want to give an entirely unfavorable impression. As noted above, Pivotal has many, many strengths. I'll add the layout is impressive, as the book contains a great deal of images, including well-chosen cartoons, good election maps, and useful photographs.

Onward to the next book in my progressive studies...

Pivotal Decades The United States, 1900-1920