Our Unfinished Business
Phillip Berryman, "Our Unfinished Business"
English | 1989 | ISBN: 0679739637 | EPUB | pages: 204 | 1.9 mb
English | 1989 | ISBN: 0679739637 | EPUB | pages: 204 | 1.9 mb
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s, notion that activism and reform recur in United States history in thirty-year cycles is simple and elegant—and attractive to those of us who would like to believe that we are due for another such period. He traces three reform cycles in our century: Progressivism at its outset; the New Deal in the 1930s; and the civil rights, antiwar, and other movements of the 1960s. Each of these was followed by a period of consolidation and then by one of seeming reaction (or at least stasis): the presidencies of Coolidge and Harding in the 1920s, Eisenhower in the 1950s and Reagan in the 1980s. Interestingly, no uniform economic factor explains these cycles. The New Deal was a response to the Great Depression, while Progressivism and the sixties movements took place in periods of economic expansion. It seems only common sense that a nation cannot sustain continual change and turmoil; it is not surprising that periods of intense activism are followed by periods of consolidation and even apparent reaction, at intervals of roughly a generation in length.