Guy Emerson Mount responds to Chapter 5—Modernist Revolts against Absolutes (1890-1920) in Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History.
A Centrist History of American Centrism
Ideas constitute a messy excess—ungovernable, contested, and forever in flux. In an effort wrangle this stampede of American thought while distilling it down to a short usable narrative, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen largely adopts the pragmatism of her main protagonists in chapter five of her brief survey, The Ideas That Made America. She chases down a history that she thinks will work in practice. Yet what emerges is as much a reproduction of American myths as a representation of the realities of American thinkers during the Progressive Era.
Part of the problem is that synthesis is a truly impossible genre. As a sweeping chapter in an even more sweeping book, chapter five offers more entry points, provocations, and possibilities than any book, never mind one part of it, might safely hope to contain. Perhaps that’s part of the point. The Ideas That Made America strives to present a metamodern tale for our own times, a new grand narrative that tries to reckon with its internal diversity. As a solution, Ratner-Rosenhagen creates a centrist history of American centrism. The book maintains an abiding faith in the ever-tenuous victory of good ideas and the march of progress. Ratner-Rosenhagen insists that America, despite itself, is an idea worth salvaging.[1]
In The Ideas That Made America, the so-called Progressive Era unfolds as a series of dualisms. Relativism/absolutism, nationalism/multiculturalism, idealism/pragmatism, and unity/diversity do battle with one another, but Ratner-Rosenhagen consistently ushers readers back to a perennially contested middle ground in which liberal centrism successfully manages the conflict between a parade of apparently binary contradictions.[2]
While Ratner-Rosenhagen holds on at almost every turn to American liberalism, activists, scholars, and thinkers to her left are not so ready to agree with her positive treatment of liberal centrism.
In contrast to Ratner-Rosenhagen’s more hopeful take on centrist liberalism, many of today’s grassroots thinkers and activists to her left are not so sure. Identifying the anti-democratic tendencies within American liberalism itself, they question the assumption that progressivism was a success as well as what is to be done today, in its wake. They object to the authoritarianism of a pragmatic, technocratic racial capitalism that has continually promised neoliberal “solutions” for nearly every problem, big and small. This has proven inadequate to advancing or even sustaining democracy or justice, they contend. While Ratner-Rosenhagen holds on at almost every turn to American liberalism, activists, scholars, and thinkers to her left are not so ready to agree with her positive treatment of liberal centrism.
To bring coherence to her overview, Ratner-Rosenhagen contends that American “pragmatism reflects the vibrant, contested, democratic society from which it came.”[3] This is despite the perennial anti-democratic nature of US empire both at home and abroad. Even idealistic crusaders she includes in her study, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, themselves came to question the very existence of an American democracy. Du Bois’s thought appears in chapter five, but in Ratner-Rosenhagen’s telling, it is largely removed from any attachment to Black radicalism. Instead, Du Bois is situated firmly within the straightjacket of a German romanticism that he was already well beyond by 1914. Rather than seriously explore (Black) American radicalism, Ratner-Rosenhagen sees (white) pragmatists such as Henry James, John Dewey, and Charles Darwin as the central actors in the Progressive Era. They appear as capable arbiters of reform who stood ready to capture more radical critiques as part of what they (and perhaps she) saw as a wider teleological march towards America’s supposedly “better angels.”[4] Here Ratner-Rosenhagen joins Jill Lepore, the 2024 Democratic Party, and a slew of other well-meaning thinkers within the liberal tradition in trying to redeem an America that never was.
Progressivism’s Racism Reconsidered
In our current moment of a resurgent American fascism, perhaps the most pressing shortcoming of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s liberal centrist approach to the Progressive Era occurs at the very opening of her chapter on the topic. The progressives (who, of course, existed along a pragmatic/idealistic continuum that invariably gets lost in a synthesis of this “brief” a scale) constituted something of a “modernist revolt” for Ratner-Rosenhagen—a phrase that also serves as the title of the chapter, if not its governing thesis. Using the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair as evidence, she views the racist iterations of empire displayed at this grand spectacle as remnants of a supposedly vanishing era that were, in her words, “more retrospective than prospective.”[5]
For Ratner-Rosenhagen, as well as many of her subjects, the hope was to relegate racism (an idea conceptualized in the book primarily as an idea rather than a system) to a premodern era of backwardness. Human zoos, slavery, and a bygone ignorance—these were a thing of the past, she claimed. Instead, the tolerant, multicultural religious diversity on offer at the World’s Parliament of Religions at the World’s Columbian Exposition becomes, for Ratner-Rosenhagen, the very core of the American progressive spirit if not America itself. If only this were true. Both then and now, such a vision proves more proscriptive than descriptive. While we all might wish it were otherwise, the energies of racism, empire, capitalism, and settler colonialism continue to drive American life. Racism, unfortunately, has never been retrograde.
Standing in support of the human zoos that might otherwise be transformed into the Baha’i utopias of Alain Locke’s dreams, we find progressive/pragmatists such as the “flagrant racist” Edward Ross and the horribly influential Herbert Spencer.[6] Yet rather than situate pragmatic, progressive racists at the very core of the modernist project, these figures are painted as embarrassing anomalies. While Ratner-Rosenhagen does rightfully point out that Spencer used his invented notions of social Darwinism and survival of the fittest “to justify his laissez-faire economic and political ideas,” what goes unsaid is that pragmatism writ large, along with its modernist progressive impulses, would also serve the same function.[7]
After all, capitalism is, if nothing else, pragmatic. It developed alongside race and empire through increasingly amoral compromises, unethical justifications, and thoroughly instrumental “solutions” that always resulted in more pragmatism and more capitalism, all in the name of modern progress.[8] Indeed, as Ratner-Rosenhagen smartly notes, Spencer (and I would argue pragmatists and progressives more broadly) produced a mollifying philosophy of capitalist apologia where they could imagine that “the hardships, smut, and suffering were prices worth paying for progress.”[9]
What If the Story Is Even Worse?
Were all these utilitarian sufferings simply the necessary “birth pangs of modernization,” as Ratner-Rosenhagen implies?[10] What if the story is even worse? Perhaps Spencer, racial segregation, and the eugenics movement were not a betrayal of the pragmatic, progressive tradition of Darwin and Dewey, but their underlying force and logical conclusion. What if racism, empire, sexism, environmental degradation, and labor exploitation were (and are) ontologically constitutive of the modern world rather than an accidental aberration or a scourge to be purged? In other words, what if the “birth bangs of modernization” are, as Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it, “not a bump along the road but…the road itself.”[11]
Take antiblackness as an example. In Ratner-Rosenhagen’s story, Franz Boaz and Ida B. Wells are invoked to argue that at least part of “the progressive agenda” was an effort to “root out white Americans’ squeamishness about diversity and to recognize it instead as the very feature that recommends American democracy to the world.”[12] Is this really the best way to think about what the progressives were doing overall, given the Spencers and the Rosses of the world? Even Wells herself, in her famous 1900 essay “Lynch Law in America,” did not see racism as a backwards, ignorant, “sudden outburst of uncontrolled fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob.” Instead, she argued that lynching (and racism by extension) “represents the cool, calculating deliberation of intelligent people.”[13] Lynching was a pragmatic “solution” to the end of legalized slavery and the American answer to Black radical demands for liberation.
One of the “intelligent people” that Wells likely had in mind was progressive reformer par excellence Jane Addams. In a 1901 article for the Independent, Addams did not sound much like a promoter of progressive inclusion. Here she conceptualized Black peoples as one of two “Alien races” who were “under-developed” and whose integration into white Southern society represented “the “most intricate of all problems.” Despite Wells’ evidence to the contrary, Addams all but assumed the “bestial” nature of Black “criminality” and likened Black lynching victims to a “stupid child” who must be taught better morality so as not to spark the ire of Southern Lynch mobs.[14] Wells, in her formal response to Addams’s “fine-people-on-both-sides” tract, chastised this “progressive” friend for characterizing Black men as “moral monsters” in need of uplift even as she acknowledged Addams’ overall anti-lynching sentiments expressed in the piece.[15] What becomes clear is that even staunch antiracists such as Du Bois, Wells, and, eventually, Addams were not immune from holding—or even being driven by—racist ideas.[16]
While Ratner-Rosenhagen intonates that the progressive agenda was not a monolith of ideas and that it contained both racist and antiracist elements, the notion that antiracist ideas themselves also frequently contained racist elements, inextricably woven within them, should have made its way off the cutting room floor and into the book. As it turns out, antiblackness bolstered by overseas empire operated as a pragmatic, logical, “progressive” solution to the global shifts in the political economy that abolition had wrought. Segregation, eugenics, sharecropping, policing, lynching, and nearly every other idea and practice that harmed Black people during this period were invariably framed at one point or another as part of a need to manage an orderly progressive transition away from America’s founding institution while controlling a perennially antagonistic Black workforce. Replacing Black labor through overseas empire, colonization, emigration, and immigration were just a few of these “progressive” solutions.[17]
The Bourne Supremacy
By far the strongest part of the chapter is the section on early disability advocate and socialist Randolph Bourne. As an antiwar activist who would rail against the idea of a homogenizing melting pot in favor of a diverse “trans-national America,” as he called it, Bourne is everything one might hope for from an actual progressive thinker. If he were truly representative of pragmatists and progressives more broadly (he is not), he might have helped make the case for them as constituting a modernist revolt. Yet even here we have a problem: not so much with Bourne, but with Ratner-Rosenhagen’s reading of him.
Immune from seemingly every trend in contemporary Black Studies (much less intersectional Black Disability Studies).[18] Ratner-Rosenhagen inexplicably describes Bourne as having “some sense of what it must feel like to be a new immigrant or black in America.” Antiblackness, here, is conflated with white immigrant experiences and reduced to simply being thought of as “always, invariably, ‘discounted at the start.’”[19] While Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism may not be everyone’s cup of tea, his claim that “the ruse of analogy…mystifies, rather than clarifies Black suffering” has never been more true than it is in this passage that attempts to analogize antiblackness both to the (temporary) experiences of white European immigrants and Bourne’s physical appearance.[20] Something tells me that Bourne himself would protest.
This is because antiblackness is far more than an idea, an ideology, or the phenomenological experience of being “discounted at the start.”[21] Ideas don’t exist in a vacuum. They have a dynamic, dialectic, and often complicated relationship with, dare I say, material conditions and social relations. Sometimes racist or antiblack ideas reflect the base. Other times, they obfuscate and justify it as a mystifying superstructure. And at others still, they zig while reality zags, acting as completely detached, unmoored libidinal outpourings beyond any material causality or rational explanation. The gratuitous and often arbitrary nature of violence against Black peoples, Black ideas, Black epistemologies, and Black bodies demands better theoretical tools than even Marxism (much less liberalism) can offer. And better tools exist in the literature on racial capitalism, Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, and Black queer and Black feminist Studies. While differing among themselves on any number of points, all share a conceptualization of Blackness and antiblackness that is structural, historical, material, and in many cases, ontologically distinct from other modes of oppression with which they might intersect. This deep well of Black thought about the systemic ontological nature of antiblackness could have been consulted to great effect in conceptualizing a survey of US intellectual history in its high pragmatic phase, as well as in general, but it is not here.
One small factual error perhaps best illustrates the masking of the horrific underpinnings of America’s so-called progressivism. In discussing the University of Chicago as a central institution shaping American academic thought during the Progressive Era, Ratner-Rosenhagen mistakenly follows the University of Chicago’s own self-congratulatory and delusional origin myth that attempts to place it firmly within a progressive tradition and chronology. She claims that the University was “newly founded” in 1894, when in reality, the University (like so many others) was founded much earlier in 1856, on the profits of slavery. This dirty little secret is one that the administration has been trying to literally scrub off of its walls lest it complicate its self-proclaimed ‘progressive’ history.[22]
While certainly an understandable and innocent oversight, this erasure is functionally emblematic of the chapter as a whole. As students today at the University of Chicago walk under an arc dedicated to the racist ‘progressive’ Jane Addams, they enter a sanitized campus where the structural reality of a 3000-acre cotton plantation owned by Senator Stephen A. Douglass in Laurence County, Mississippi along with the blood, sweat, tears, and thoughts of over 132 enslaved peoples can be safely contained within a progressive fiction. The idea that progressives “turned university campuses, civic institutions, and urban streets into laboratories for social improvement” is simply laughable to any Black-led grassroots community organization on the South Side of Chicago, then and now.[23] Readers would do well to consult Davarian Baldwin or Craig Steven Wilder for more sober assessments of American universities that do not follow the progressives’ stories they tell themselves about themselves.[24]
And what about the pragmatists? Did they, along with their progressive allies, really constitute a “modernist revolt,” as Ratner-Rosenhagen argues, or were they instead part of a managerial reaction that rationalized existing social hierarchies and suppressed more radical revolts bubbling up from everyday thought and action? To put it another way (and in a way that the book does not), is it not the case that modernity had to be constantly (re)sold intellectually to a restless population always on the verge of (actual) rebellion, revolt, or downright revolution? Perhaps we can understand pragmatism as the perennial salesman convincing people to drop their big ideas, abandon their dreams of liberation, and instead, just accept what works right now.
In this sense, pragmatism wasn’t a “modernist revolt” at all. It was the suppressor of revolt. As Kai Perry Parker will be showing in an upcoming book on Black religion during this period, everyday Black thinkers during the Progressive Era were keenly aware of the hypocritical rhetoric and rosy progress narratives being used to mask ongoing structural harm.[25] Black people revolted against these epistemologies and clearly saw this pragmatic/progressive posturing for what it was. So while there were actual modernist revolts, they were decided not “liberal” but much more radical than this chapter might indicate.
Is Synthesis Possible?
A final, quick note on scale and directionality. This is, if nothing else, a history from above. The kinds of ideas circulating on factory floors, barbershops, and cotton plantations—that quotidian thought that disrupts the larger progress narratives at play here—simply do not make a meaningful appearance. While the bottom-up intellectual history taking place throughout Black Studies continues to churn out fresh insights, the complexities that this bottom-up directionality necessitates may defy the very genre of the synthesis itself. There is also a larger question of craft here as it relates to the narration of new master narratives: if we aim to tell the “big story,” what is the place of “small” people? Are they simply a collective, undifferentiated consciousness that provides the backdrop context within which big thinkers think? Can Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States find new life in our metamodern era or in the history of ideas? Are grassroots thoughts even capable of telling a better story of the US, given their archival limitations? This is less a critique of Ratner-Rosenhagen’s approach and more of a reflection on the potential impossibility of the short synthesis as a genre that will almost by design have to be short on small people.
In the end, progressivism simply should not be narrated as a historical counterpoint to American racism, settler colonialism, and empire, but rather as a critical part of its development. While this chapter may argue otherwise, Ratner-Rosenhagen nonetheless allows for further scrutiny of how we should narrate and analyze our historical subjects rather than simply letting the archive speak for itself. At a moment today when genuine revolt seems more urgent than ever, this chapter brings us back to a time, not unlike our present, when the very architects of power imagined themselves as rebelling against the very systems and structures that they were upholding. Ratner-Rosenhagen’s chapter ultimately demonstrates that despite a flurry of consternations, the center held during the Progressive Era. While our current moment may present such an outcome as a best-case scenario, we can only hope that this time the Left will find a way beyond the tyranny of pragmatism and the posturing of a faux-progressivism.
About the Author
Guy Emerson Mount is an Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University who is currently serving as a Carter G. Woodson Fellow at the University of Virginia. Previously, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago, where he also earned his PhD. He is currently finishing his first book manuscript, tentatively titled Slavery’s Empire: Reconstruction in the Black Pacific. It follows the quotidian transnationalism of Black workers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the US as they circulated within America’s budding Pacific empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Notes
[1] For more on metamodernism (and the related idea of post-postmodernism) as a way to describe the historical moment and cultural shift in Western sensibilities starting in the late twentieth century, see Robin van den Akker, Alison Gibbons, and Timotheous Vermenluen, Metamodernism: Historicity, Affect, and Depth after Postmodernism (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
[2] For a significantly more critical view of this process of how liberalism creates and defends a center on the level of ideas, see Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
[3] Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 103.
[4] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 103.
[5] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 99.
[6] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 111. Interestingly, this very World’s Fair was the first time that the Baha’i Faith’s multicultural, multireligious vision was publicly proclaimed in the US, and this strain of thought became a key influence on Alain Locke’s vision of an actual progressive pluralism that is discussed in the chapter (sans the Baha’i influence). For more on this, see David Weinfeld, “Isolated Believer: Alain Locke, Baha’i Secularist,” in New Perspectives on the Black Radical Tradition, eds. Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018).
[7] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 108.
[8] For an excellent example of this confluence, see Caitlin Rosenthal, Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).
[9] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 109.
[10] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 108.
[11] This phrase was originally coined at a 2015 interview on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as per Daniel Kreps, “Watch-Ta-Nehisi Coates Discuss Race in American on ‘Daily Show’” Rolling Stone, 24 July 2015, https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/watch-ta-nehisi-coates-discuss-race-in-america-on-daily-show-57128/.
[12] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 113.
[13] Ida B. Wells, “Lynch Law in America,” The Arena 23 (January 1900), 15.
[14] Jane Addams, “Respect for Law” in The Independent, 3 January 1901.
[15] Ida B Wells, “Lynching and the Excuse for It in The Independent, 16 May 1901.
[16] As the often invoked but less frequently read Ibram X. Kendi has shown in Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), such racism among professed antiracists was the norm and not the exception for both Black and white activists.
[17] For the intersection of colonialism and emigration, see Christina Cecelia Davidson, Dominican Crossroads: H.C.C. Astwood and the Moral Politics of Race-Making in the Age of Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024). For immigration to replace Black labor see Moon-Ho Jung Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). For colonization and empire, see Guy Emerson Mount, “Shall I Go?”: Black Colonization in the Pacific, 1840-1914, Journal of the Civil War Era 14, 4 (December 2024), 512-540.
[18] See Theri Pickens Black Madness:: Mad Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019); Vilissa Thompson and Trimiko Melacon, “Ramp Your Voice: An Interview with Vilissa Thompson” Black Perspectives, 18 March 2017; Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022); Dennis Tyler, Disabilities of the Color Line: Redressing Antiblackness from Slavery to the Present (New York: NYU Press, 2022); and G. Jasper Conner, “Blind and Deaf Together: Cross-Disability Community at Virginia’s Residential School for Black Disabled Youth,” Disability Studies Quarterly 43, 1 (Fall 2023) for excellent examples of the depth and breadth of this line of inquiry.
[19] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 113.
[20] Frank B. Wilderson, III, Afropessimism (New York: Liveright, 2020), 37.
[21] For a thorough takedown of this conceptualization of racism as a caste-based set of experiences rather than a structural position, see Charisse Burden-Stelly’s “Caste Does not Explain Race,” Boston Review, 15 December 2020, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/caste-does-not-explain-race/.
[22] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 107. Miles Burton, “University Removes Plaque, Stone Commemorating Stephen Douglas and Old University of Chicago; “C Bench” Keystone remains” The Chicago Maroon, 9 July 2020, https://chicagomaroon.com/27936/news/university-removes-plaque-stone-commemorating-slav/. The university would once again scrub this voided space during the recent UChicago Popular University for Gaza encampment where an anarchist protestor (likely aware of this history) scrawled the phrase “Escalate for Gaza!” over the exact site where the stone commemorating the original campus once stood. See Maroon Staff, “Pro-Palestine Encampment Enters Its Second Day on the Quad” in Chicago Maroon, 30 April 2024, https://chicagomaroon.com/42314/uncategorized/live-updates-pro-palestine-encampment-enters-its-second-day-on-quad/.
[23] Ratner-Rosenhagen, 109. N.A., “Abolish UofC’s Crime Lab,” South Side Weekly, 28 October 2020, https://southsideweekly.com/op-ed-abolish-uofcs-crime-lab/.
[24] See Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2021) and Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
[25] Kai Parker, City of Black Souls Chicago, Ethiopianism, and the Black Apocalyptic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2025).