Progressive Inequality: Rich and Poor in New York, 1890-1920

by David Huyssen

Overview

The Progressive Era has been depicted as a seismic event in American history—a landslide of reform that curbed capitalist excesses and reduced the gulf between rich and poor. Progressive Inequality cuts against the grain of this popular consensus, demonstrating how income inequality’s growth prior to the stock market crash of 1929 continued to aggravate class divisions. As David Huyssen makes clear, Progressive attempts to alleviate economic injustice often had the effect of entrenching class animosity, making it more, not less, acute.

Huyssen interweaves dramatic stories of wealthy and poor New Yorkers at the turn of the twentieth century, uncovering how initiatives in charity, labor struggles, and housing reform chafed against social, economic, and cultural differences. These cross-class actions took three main forms: prescription, in which the rich attempted to dictate the behavior of the poor; cooperation, in which mutual interest engendered good-faith collaboration; and conflict, in which sharply diverging interests produced escalating class violence. In cases where reform backfired, it reinforced a set of class biases that remain prevalent in America today, especially the notion that wealth derives from individual merit and poverty from lack of initiative.

A major contribution to the history of American capitalism, Progressive Inequality makes tangible the abstract dynamics of class relations by recovering the lived encounters between rich and poor—as allies, adversaries, or subjects to inculcate—and opens a rare window onto economic and social debates in our own time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674281400
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	03/10/2014
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

David Huyssen is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in American History at the University of York, UK.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Fault Lines of Rich and Poor 1

1 Invading the Tenements 11

2 Bank on the Bowery 31

3 Prescribing Reform 49

4 Loving the Poor with Severity 63

5 The Business of Godly Charity 89

6 Reaching Out to the Rich 107

7 Between Empathy and Prejudice 123

8 The Limits of Private Philanthropy 135

9 Killing Workers for Profit 151

10 The Primacy of Property 165

11 Sisters in Struggle 181

12 To Cooperate or Condescend 201

13 Sisters at Odds 213

14 Hard Fists, Short Fuses on the City Rails 227

15 Making the World Safe for Inequality 245

Epilogue: Recognizing Class in Ourselves 273

Abbreviations 281

Notes 285

Acknowledgments 361

Index 365

Editorial Reviews

Progressive Inequality puts a stake through the heart of the pernicious myth of classlessness. Writing with passion and empathy, Huyssen recognizes class as the dominant feature of the American experience, enacted most vividly in the collision of rich and poor at the soup kitchen, in the settlement house, and on the street corner. If our own current Gilded Age gives way to a new Progressive Era, we must be prepared to think with Huyssen about class as an artifact of pervasive inequality, and perhaps more hopefully, as its antidote.

Seth Rockman

Progressive Inequality provides a rich portrayal of the dynamics of cross-class interaction in turn-of-the-century New York, and convincingly demonstrates the many ways in which charitable aid subverted its ostensible commitment to redressing inequality… Progressive Inequality provides a convincing rebuke of ‘the myth of classless democracy.’

Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era - Angus Burgin

[Huyssen] argues engagingly that despite three decades of hopeful reform activism and regulatory innovation, ‘inequality between rich and poor became more, not less acute, all the way up to the stock market crash of 1929.’

New York Times - Sam Roberts

Huyssen’s close analysis of encounters across the class divide in Progressive Era New York suggests that the inequities and inequalities inherited from the Gilded Age handily survived—and were even reinforced by—various efforts at reform. He offers fresh, sophisticated readings of an assortment of inter-class collaborations and confrontations. Highly recommended.

Mike Wallace