Matson, Kevin. Creating a Democratic Public: The Struggle for Urban Participatory Democracy. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.

Summary
Kevin Mattson’s Creating a Democratic Public explores various activists and figures who attempted to form a more democratic public (a “real” democracy where the public is at the center of political life). Mattson defines a democratic public as a “place” where “citizens gather to deliberate and make public judgments about local and national issues that affect their lives.” (4) This book, Mattson believes, is beyond the typical academic history (more in the cloth of Charles Beard and James Harvey Robinson) and aims to use history to better understand and grapple with the present; in this case, the lack of a democratic public. Mattson writes: “This books takes contemporary concerns about the state of American democracy and asks how things could have been different. It is both a work of history and social criticism.” (6) Mattson examines the Progressive Era, a time period when Americans “committed themselves to reexamining political institutions and intellectual assumptions guiding Americans into the modern age.” (7) The reform activists during this time period (from muckrackering journalists to urban activists) accepted, to varying degrees, that the American political system was corrupted and influenced by many of the big corporations that emerged at the turn of the 20th century. They thus advocated for democratic publics, via forums, universities, and public schools, that would provide citizens a platform to debate the key issues and, over time, reform and remake the American political system. Mattson’s book focuses particularly on the urban center and how activists envisioned cities to be potential spaces for democratic publics. Ultimately, the argument of this book is that the “political thought and work of the activists and intellectuals” of the progressive era can “inform our current hopes for a better American democracy” as they provide an institutional basis to think critically about constructing a better democracy. (10) While unsuccessful in their larger vision, these progressive activists, Mattson contends, “succeeded in replacing a nineteenth-century system of government ruled by bosses and corrupt patronage with a more modern, efficient administration run by expert civil servants and democratically elected officials.” (129)