Dec 17, 2009

The Promise of American Life | Critical Overview

The Promise of American Life is widely acknowledged to be the major treatise on American progressive thought. Although influential, Croly’s book was not widely read when it was first published. The readership it did gain, however, was a group of educated, influential, and politically savvy people, including president Theodore Roosevelt. As Edward A. Stettner reports in his book Shaping Modern Liberalism, Roosevelt was so impressed with Croly’s theories that he wrote to him, stating, ‘‘I do not know when I have read a book which I felt profited me as much as...