Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (American Politics and Political Economy Series)

Roots of Reform offers a sweeping revision of our understanding of the rise of the regulatory state in the late nineteenth century. Sanders argues that politically mobilized farmers were the driving force behind most of the legislation that increased national control over private economic power. She demonstrates that farmers from the South, Midwest, and West reached out to the urban laborers who shared their class position and their principal antagonist—northeastern monopolistic industrial and financial capital—despite weak electoral support from organized labor.

Based on new evidence from legislative records and other sources, Sanders shows that this tenuous alliance of "producers versus plutocrats" shaped early regulatory legislation, remained powerful through the populist and progressive eras, and developed a characteristic method of democratic state expansion with continued relevance for subsequent reform movements.

Roots of Reform is essential reading for anyone interested in this crucial period of American political development.

• A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920
• The End Of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War
• Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Women in Culture and Society)
• Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age
• Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Gender and American Culture)
• Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist (The Working Class in American History)
• Free Speech in its Forgotten Years, 1870-1920 (Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society)
• Reinventing “The People”: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Working Class in American History)
• The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Politics and Society in Modern America)
• Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government