From forthcoming review of Lewis Perry, Civil Disobedience: An American Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), in Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
[...] Activists in the Progressive Era also accelerated the "Americanization of civil disobedience" by self-consciously claiming to be heirs of the nation's democratic traditions and by exhibiting a general reverence for American institutions and laws; they usually accepted the legal penalties for their disobedience (143). With inventive new legal strategies designed to create test cases in the courts, Progressive Era reformers helped join the threads of a distinctively American civil disobedience---active, but peaceful, confrontation with authorities, combined with a willingness to suffer whatever legal penalties resulted from such noncooperation. Yet in doing so, they also bequeathed to later generations an American tradition of differentiating between legitimate and illegitimate forms of civil disobedience. That process of differentiation became even more pronounced after the Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s, according to Perry. Wider public discussions of civil disobedience bespoke a general consensus that it was a "source of strength in America's democratic system" (274). But acceptance of civil disobedience dependend on an expectation that it stay within certain limits. "Legitimized and to some degree circumscribed---that was the new state of civil disobedience" (285).
That is also largely the state of civil disobedience today, Perry argues. But in his closing chapters, he notes some recent, troubling departures from the rituals of civil disobedience that Progressive activists and their heirs worked so hard to establish, both on the part of activists willing to violate the law anonymously instead of publicly suffering an unjust penalty, and on the part of law enforcement officers too intent on the maintenance of order to care much for the almost choreographed drama of peaceful protest and public arrest that proved so powerful in the past. […]
W. Caleb McDaniel
Rice University