The Age of Reform

Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. traces a single line of American reform politics from the Populist revolt of the 1890s through Progressivism and into Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, arguing that these movements, usually treated as distinct episodes, actually share deep continuities in outlook and motivation. Where earlier historians such as Charles Beard had explained reform mainly through economic conflict between classes, Hofstadter turns to social psychology, arguing that status anxiety, a sense of displaced social standing among the older middle class, drove much of the Populist and Progressive impulse as much as material hardship did, and he does not soften his account of the nativism and antisemitism that ran through parts of the Populist movement alongside its genuine democratic energy.

Hofstadter writes with real skepticism toward the sentimental, agrarian myth that had shaped how Americans remembered Populism, treating the movement's romantic self image of the independent yeoman farmer as itself a historical artifact worth examining rather than a simple fact about American life. He carries the same skeptical eye into his treatment of Progressivism and the New Deal, arguing that reformers in each era inherited emotional patterns, a suspicion of concentrated wealth, a nostalgia for a simpler and more independent citizenry, from the movements that came before them, even as the actual economic conditions they were reacting to kept changing. The book moves through argument rather than narrative, building its case across successive reform eras rather than following any single figure or event, and it suits a reader interested in the psychological undercurrents of reform politics as much as in policy outcomes, delivered in prose sharp enough to unsettle readers who had taken Populism's self mythology at face value.