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(Richard White is excellent.)
NY Times Sunday Book Review, Sept. 24 2017
When Corruption and Venality Were the Lifeblood of America
By SEAN WILENTZS
THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS
The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
By Richard White
Illustrated. 941 pp. Oxford. $35
“The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” which Mark Twain co-wrote with
Charles Dudley Warner, isn’t much of a novel but it has two strong
features. First, a guileful character: the backwoods beauty Laura
Hawkins, who falls in with a corrupt United States senator, connives her
way to the top of Washington high society, beats a murder rap after a
sensational trial, then suddenly dies of remorse (a fate the authors’
wives evidently insisted upon). Second, its excellent title, which
remains American historians’ standard label for the fourth quarter of
the 19th century.
“The Republic for Which It Stands,” Richard White’s new history of that
age, as well as the Reconstruction decade that preceded it, is a
capacious and forceful book with a dull title — the inverse of Twain and
Warner’s satire. Instead of one arresting character, White develops
dozens. (Among them are two Henry Adamses, the dyspeptic historian whom
you know and a Louisiana ex-slave who courageously fought white
terrorists before he encouraged freed men and women to migrate en masse,
first to Liberia, then to Kansas.) The Gilded Age will keep its name,
but White’s book ought to worsen its already dismal reputation for
sordidness and rapacity.
White, who teaches at Stanford, is one of the nation’s most gifted
historians, the author of several important studies of the American
West, including a scathing exposé of the giant post-Civil War
transcontinental railroads. Like that book, this one, the latest
installment in the multivolume Oxford History of the United States, is
handsomely written and dense in detail. It is also laced with an irony
that sometimes focuses and sometimes plays lightly off White’s outrage
at the spoliation he finds almost everywhere he looks.
The age was cynical but White’s book, allowing for a lapse or two, is
not. This is because he is drawn to what he describes (in a phrase
borrowed from the book’s unsecret hero, the novelist and editor William
Dean Howells) as “the common” — the striving middle- and working-class
America of shops and neighborhoods, churches and trade unions. These
realms, too, were part of the Gilded Age. In mostly unsung ways, they
expanded the public good, driven by the promise of a free-labor
democracy purged of the oligarchic slavery that died with the Confederacy.
But that promise, White demonstrates, turned out to be treacherous. The
ambiguous liberal ideals of contract freedom and self-regulation that
helped eradicate slavery became instruments for brute and chaotic
corporate power. With the ex-slaves betrayed and the Indians conquered
at last, an “uncommon” America emerged, characterized by neither the
imperatives of creative destruction nor even simple greed as much as by
extravagance, mismanagement and predatory flimflam. Risk-taking and
rugged individualism, big business’s eternally self-proclaimed virtues,
were in extremely short supply at the top; Gilded Age fortunes sprang
from government subsidies, insider tips and, above all, the corruption
required to get these favors. “Corruption suffused government and the
economy,” White writes; it was not a distortion of the system but the
system’s lifeblood.
The book begins with an evocative description of the public mourning and
funeral of Abraham Lincoln, whose tragic shade haunts every chapter.
Lincoln would be revered as the Union’s savior and the Great
Emancipator, but his envisaged “new birth of freedom” would soon enough
be suppressed. White treats the decade after Appomattox (with a nod to
the historian Elliott West) as the Greater Reconstruction, in which the
federal government aimed to clear out the Far West as well as tame the
defeated South by inculcating the virtues of free labor and economic
development. White also suggests that the venality and political
feebleness that ensured Reconstruction’s overthrow in the South marked
the actual commencement of the Gilded Age.
Linking the subjugation of the Indians with the government’s treatment
(and, finally, abandonment) of the ex-slaves is meant to provoke
recognition of the limits of American equality after the Civil War. Yet
it leads White to pass too quickly over the fruits of Southern
Reconstruction before its downfall in the mid-1870s. Backdating the
Gilded Age to 1865 may explain White’s odd retrieval of the traditional
malicious caricature of Ulysses S. Grant — the president who, with all
his flaws and errors, did break the Ku Klux Klan — as an inept,
money-struck coddler of corruption.
The narrative improves at the Panic of 1873, a Wall Street disaster that
initiated a five-year depression and that temporarily disgraced the
Republican Party. The panic hit the railroads especially hard and helped
clear the way for new titans of industry, not least the pious oilman
John D. Rockefeller, a steward of the Lord who, White notes, “adamantly
believed that ‘God gave me my money.’” The depression led to drastic
wage cuts and stricter work rules, which touched off the great railroad
strike of 1877, pitting entire working-class communities against police,
state militia and federal troops. Shaken respectables thought the Paris
Commune had crossed the Atlantic. The Rev. Henry Ward Beecher admonished
the poor to heed God’s will and “reap the misfortunes of inferiority.”
Misfortune multiplied over the next two decades while well-connected
financiers and industrialists reaped staggering fortunes until an even
greater depression hit in 1893. White’s account of it all is a masterly
historical synthesis. American living standards briefly improved, then
hit bottom after a long-term decline: In 1880, the average American-born
white boy of 10 could expect to live to age 48 and grow to 5 feet 5
inches, considerably less than his Revolutionary-era great-grandfathers.
And the figures were worse for blacks. (Immigrants were not included in
the measurements.) In the growing big cities — where immigrants, White
writes, “were creating the American future” — overcrowding, trash,
sewage, human waste, animal waste and decaying carcasses bred
contamination and disease. Larcenous local political machines, feeding
off the graft of fee-based (which is to say semi-privatized) government,
were no help; the party hacks and spoilsmen at the top of national
politics produced leaders like President Rutherford B. Hayes, a man, in
White’s view, “who thought that attracting opposition from nearly every
direction meant that he was right.”
“Common” America erupted again, in the furious strikes and local
political campaigns of 1886, collectively termed the Great Upheaval, and
in the labor wars at Andrew Carnegie’s Homestead steelworks in 1892 and
the railroad car magnate George Pullman’s eponymous company town in
1894, all part of a crescendo of unrest unmatched in the industrializing
world. White’s handling of these set pieces is especially strong,
sympathetic to the commoners yet not without wit (as in his appraisal of
the anarchist terrorists, “who rarely missed an opportunity to make a
bad situation worse”). But the labor struggles are just a big slice of
the story. There is almost nothing about the era that White fails to
treat with intelligence and style, as he ranges easily from the
dissipation of classical liberalism to the Lakota Ghost Dance and
Wounded Knee to the antimorality tale of the accused ax-murderer Lizzie
Borden.
White’s book ends in 1896, with the debacle of the agrarian Populist
movement and reconsolidation of a Republican Party that now worshiped
the gold standard and protective tariffs. White turns to Howells to make
sense of it all, and finds him “surprisingly hopeful,” glimpsing an
American future that is democratic and egalitarian. But there was also,
it needs remembering, the Howells who in 1894 wrote, only in part
satirically, that “inequality is as dear to the American heart as
liberty itself.” Here is the constant American struggle, and Richard
White has related a decisive part of its history with stamina and skill.
Sean Wilentz's latest book is the forthcoming “No Property in Man,” on
antislavery, the Constitution and the coming of the Civil War.
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