Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and Transpacific Exchange Shaped American Reform by Marilyn Lake

Marilyn Lake’s important book Progressive New World reveals the forgotten transpacific linkages and relationships (mostly between America and Australia) that animated Progressive Era reform in the United States. Lake adopts the approach she and coauthor Henry Reynolds used to great effect in Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (2008), which broke new ground on the study of whiteness by tracing the circulation of people, ideas, and technologies among white settler societies that gave rise to what W. E. B. Dubois famously called the global color line (or what Pankaj Mishra has recently dubbed the “religion of whiteness”).1 The settler colonialism framework reveals the dark side of American pro-gressivism by highlighting the racial exclusion and indigenous dispossession that went into the project. “Such a perspective,” Lake explains, “allows us to better understand progressivism’s ambiguous character as simultaneously democratic and elitist, reformist and coercive, advanced and assimilationist, uplifting and repressive” (4–5). In taking this approach, Progressive New World expands the geography of progressive reform beyond Europe and the “Atlantic crossings” traced by Daniel Rodgers (though she doesn’t exactly frame it this way) and, in doing so, shows that a transnational progressivism didn’t merely grow out of a shared sense of dilemma brought on by industrial capitalism.2In Lake’s story, reformers like Theodore Roosevelt, Carrie Chapman Catt, Florence Kelley, and Oliver Wendell Holmes looked across the Pacific into the anglophone settler world for inspiration and workable social models. They admired and sought to emulate the Australasia example that had yielded progressive achievements like the secret ballot, women’s suffrage, legal minimum wage, industrial arbitration, children’s courts, and old- age pensions. Indeed, Roosevelt’s 1912 presidential candidacy was condemned for being a “mere rehash of policies long in vogue in Australia and New Zealand” (7). Reformers in the United States did not imbibe these ideas or policies wholesale: they recognized that differences in political systems and cultures required adaptation or made some of them unsuitable for the American context. In some cases, they were more interested in the “voluntarist” elements of anglophone settler reform, as opposed to statist regulations of a “socialistic” system. The peripatetic labor reformer Victor Selden Clark, a favorite of Theodore Roosevelt, found Australia’s and New Zealand’s compulsory minimum wage, maximum work hours, and industrial arbitration “too radical” to be applied to America, which drew loud protests from his friend/interlocutor Edward Tregear, who also happened to be New Zealand’s secretary of labor.Lake emphasizes the shared experience of settler colonialism in fostering “a sense of kinship across the Pacific”—a “racial kinship” generated from “their sensibilities as “pioneers” of “new lands,” as “path- breakers” and builders of “new communities” (17). For Lake’s progressives, a shared passion for creating democracy and social equality for a “white man’s country” linked them in solidarity, a comity of settler whiteness. “Reformers in settler societies began to cast themselves as ‘progressive’ in a temporal construction of ‘double difference’—distinguishing themselves both from Old World feudalism and from Stone Age savagery” (12–13). As a racialized project, reform efforts for greater social protection and equality simultaneously gave rise to racial exclusion and discrimination. For example, the logic for state aid for poor mothers was used to justify the abduction of indigenous babies and children. Minimum wage law, established to provide a living wage for workers, excluded Chinese “coolies.” The secret ballot, intended to root out political corruption and ease the passage of women’s suffrage, disenfranchised African American and immigrant voters. As Lake argues, progressive achievements for white settlers were accompanied by greater inequality and exclusion for nonwhite people. And this was a feature, not a bug, of transpacific progressivism. In identifying these trends, Lake makes an important exhortation, which American historians would do well to heed: “It is time to consider how the study of indigenous histories in the context of settler colonialism might illuminate more broadly our understanding of progressivism” (15).Progressive New World makes a compelling argument, but by not positioning itself more systematically within the existing scholarship, it misses an opportunity to fully draw out its significance. There was no need to rehearse the voluminous literature on US Progressivism, but selective engagement with key texts, especially Daniel Rodgers’ Atlantic Crossings (1998), would have highlighted the book’s critical interventions and interpretive moves, especially for nonspecialists with limited knowledge of the US Progressive Era. Progressive New World would have also been enriched by engaging with the broader scholarship on US empire and social reform. Nayan Shah, Laura Briggs, Warwick Anderson, Julian Go, and others have shown colonial state building to be an important crucible of public health and housing initiatives, maternal welfare policies, and political reform. Lake contributes to this literature by identifying previously hidden imperial transits and connections through her settler- colonial framing, whereas previous scholarship worked off a metropole-colony or internal colonialism model. But as the itinerary of Victor Clark, one of Lake’s settler progressives who was also “committed to building modern communities in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippines,” showed, settler progressivism was part of a wider, crisscrossing imperial circuitry of knowledge (17). This larger world will be lost on readers who aren’t aware of the relevant scholarship. On the issue of circulations, it wasn’t entirely clear why nearly all the traffic in transpacific progressivism was between Australia and the United States. New Zealand boasted a relatively robust social program (compared to the United States) at the time, and there was of course Canada and the white settler societies in South Africa. More sustained discussion explaining Australia’s prominence in the progressive imagination and the uneven traffic in people and ideas would have been helpful, especially because in her previous book the different white settler societies received relatively equal attention.These criticisms aside, Progressive New World makes an important contribution to our understanding of Progressivism, and Lake’s insistence that we see American history through the lens of settler colonialism provides a powerful framing to look at familiar histories anew.

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