Sunday, December 31, 2017

Hawley, The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order, 2e (1997)

Ellis W. Hawley.
The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order: A History of the American People and Their Institutions, 1917-1933, Second Edition.
Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1997.

Book Information: Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.

Previously published:
First Edition: St. Martin's Press, 1979. [Amazon.com.]
Second Edition: St. Martin's Press, 1992. [Amazon.com.]

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Author Information:
  • Ellis W. Hawley, Department of History, University of Iowa.
  • Ellis W. Hawley. The New Deal and the Problem of Monopoly: A Study in Economic Ambivalence. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1966. New York: Fordham University Press, 1995. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015.
    [Publisher; Google Books; Amazon.com.]
  • Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians.

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It turned out that I was well prepared to read The Great War and the Search for a Modern Order. I had previously read some popular histories of the 1920s (Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (1931) and Miller, New World Coming : The 1920s and the Making of Modern America (2003)). And I had read a couple textbook-type treatments of the era covered in Hawley's book (Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900-1920 (1990) and Parrish, Anxious Decades: America in Prosperity and Depression, 1920-1941 (1992)). Finally, I recently read McGerr's survey of the progressive movement (McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (2003)). McGerr says that the progressive movement ended with the First World War. This was certainly true for leftist progressives (Jane Addams, for example) who were discredited or suppressed as the U.S. entered the Great War. However, Hawley observes that more conservative organization-oriented progressives remained influential throughout the 1920s. Herbert Hoover is the premier example of this. The First World War stimulated the growth of government and private bureaucracies and institutions. These declined after the war, but various institutions persisted throughout the 1920s, which provided pre-established organizational frameworks when the need to combat the Depression arose in the 1930s. This is a major theme of Hawley's book.

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