Struggles for Justice

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.