Title The struggle for America's promise : equal opportunity at the dawn of corporate capital / Claire Goldstene

Published Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2014] ©2014

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Description 1 online resource Contents "This haven of equal opportunity to all" -- Equal opportunity as landownership : Booker T. Washington's Quest -- Equal opportunity in labor : producerism and the Knights of Labor -- Anarchism and equal opportunity : Emma Goldman in America -- Equal opportunity remade I : Samuel Gompers and the pursuit of leisure and consumption -- Equal opportunity remade II : business organizes -- Edward Bellamy and the reimagining of equal opportunity Summary "In The Struggle for America's Promise, Claire Goldstene seeks to untangle one of the enduring ideals in American history, that of economic opportunity. She explores the varied discourses about its meaning during the upheavals and corporate consolidations of the Gilded Age. Some proponents of equal opportunity seek to promote upward financial mobility by permitting more people to participate in the economic sphere thereby rewarding merit over inherited wealth. Others use opportunity as a mechanism to maintain economic inequality. This tension, embedded with the idea of equal opportunity itself and continually reaffirmed by immigrant populations, animated social dissent among urban workers while simultaneously serving efforts by business elites to counter such dissent. Goldstene uses a biographical approach to focus on key figures along a spectrum of political belief as they struggled to reconcile the inherent contradictions of equal opportunity. She considers the efforts of Booker T. Washington in a post-Civil War South to ground opportunity in landownership as an attempt to confront the intersection of race and class. She also explores the determination of the Knights of Labor to define opportunity in terms of controlling one's own labor. She looks at the attempts by Samuel Gompers through the American Federation of Labor as well as by business elites through the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Civic Federation to shift the focus of opportunity to leisure and consumption. The Struggle for America's Promise also includes such radical figures as Edward Bellamy and Emma Goldman, who were more willing to step beyond the boundaries of the discourse about opportunity and question economic competition itself"-- Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on June 16, 2014) Subject Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915. Gompers, Samuel, 1850-1924. Goldman, Emma, 1869-1940 Bellamy, Edward, 1850-1898 Bellamy, Edward, 1850-1898 Goldman, Emma, 1869-1940 Gompers, Samuel, 1850-1924 Washington, Booker T., 1856-1915 Income distribution -- United States -- History Wealth -- United States -- History Opportunity -- Economic aspects -- United States -- History Labor movement -- United States -- History Industrial relations -- United States -- History HISTORY -- United States -- 19th century. POLITICAL SCIENCE -- History & Theory. Economic history Income distribution Industrial relations Labor movement Wealth United States -- Economic conditions -- 1865-1918. United States Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2013047122 ISBN 9781617039904 161703990X 9781626740242 1626740240

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