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Summary
Summary
The story of Reconstruction is not simply about the rebuilding of the South after the Civil War. Instead, the late nineteenth century defined modern America, as Southerners, Northerners, and Westerners gradually hammered out a national identity that united three regions into a country that could become a world power. Ultimately, the story of Reconstruction is about how a middle class formed in America and how its members defined what the nation would stand for, both at home and abroad, for the next century and beyond.
A sweeping history of the United States from the era of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, this engaging book stretches the boundaries of our understanding of Reconstruction. Historian Heather Cox Richardson ties the North and West into the post-Civil War story that usually focuses narrowly on the South, encompassing the significant people and events of this profoundly important era.
By weaving together the experiences of real individuals--from a plantation mistress, a Native American warrior, and a labor organizer to Andrew Carnegie, Julia Ward Howe, Booker T. Washington, and Sitting Bull--who lived during the decades following the Civil War and who left records in their own words, Richardson tells a story about the creation of modern America.
Author Notes
Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North . She lives in Winchester, MA.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This thoughtful, engaging examination of the Reconstruction Era began as a way for author and historian Richardson to understand the deep divide--over issues like taxes, size of government and the influence of special interests--that still separate "red states" from "blue states." Richardson's persuasive thesis is that the Reconstruction, rather than the Civil War itself, is the place to look for guidance through these thorny problems. Beginning with a dramatic retelling of General Lee's surrender at Appomattox, Va., Richardson immerses readers in the issues faced by Americans trying to restore the Union on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Although her research is primarily informed by a social approach to history, Richadrson strikes a fine balance between the everyman experience and the trials of famous leaders. And because Richardson views Reconstruction as fundamental to the shape of contemporary America, she makes this period not only engaging but utterly relevant. This title will be appealing, therefore, not only to those interested in 19th century American history or the Civil War, but also to anyone interested in the roots of present-day American politics. (Mar.) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.
New York Review of Books Review
KARL ROVE is widely said to be an admirer of William McKinley, whose 1896 election victory over William Jennings Bryan ushered in an era of Republican dominance. Rove's hopes of replicating McKinley's feat were seemingly dashed by the Democratic comeback of 2006. But that development can be of little comfort to Jack Beatty, for whom America never has recovered from Bryan's epochal defeat. For Beatty, it's still McKinley's world; we just live in it. "Age of Betrayal" is a dirge for Abraham Lincoln's new birth of freedom, strangled in its cradle by greedy capitalists, reactionary jurists and resurgent white supremacists. Beatty, an Atlantic Monthly editor, makes no pretense of disinterest. His book is a thrillingly eloquent polemic, savage in its denunciations. "Gilded Age politics induces pertinent despair about democracy," he writes. "Representative government gave way to bought government. Politicians betrayed the public trust. Citizens sold their votes. Dreams faded. Ideals died of their impossibility. Cynicism poisoned hope." The trouble with this analysis is that many people who lived during the Gilded Age seem to have found it more congenial than Beatty does. Voter turnout was vastly higher then than now. And people were sufficiently satisfied with the election results that they declined to start a revolution. To Beatty's dismay, they failed even to start a powerful labor party. America's democracy, born in a precapitalist age, had no coherent response to industrialization, other than to vote again and again for politicians like McKinley who affirmed the comforting verities of bygone days. Beatty considers the theory that Rove's 19th-century predecessors used the "politics of distraction" to prevent the downtrodden from developing class consciousness. But in the end, Beatty points his finger at the bitter sectional conflicts that had led to the Civil War and united the North and Midwest against the South for decades afterward. While politicians waved bloody shirts and championed lost causes, the railroad barons seized effective control of the government: "The United States in these years took on the lineaments of a Latin American party-state, an oligarchy ratified in rigged elections, girded by bayonets and given a genial historical gloss by its raffish casting." Beatty was not always so intolerant of raffish historical characters. He is, after all, the author of "The Rascal King" (1992), a sympathetic biography of the corrupt political boss James Michael Curley. Yet in "Age of Betrayal," he only occasionally allows his villains to charm us, as when the incorrigible Roscoe Conkling entertains the Supreme Court by singing a verse from Ralph Waldo Emerson while twisting the 14th Amendment to suit his corporate clients. Conkling adds color to Beatty's proceedings, but soon we are back to hissing monochrome villains like the financier Jay Gould, reputed at the time to be "the worst man on earth since the beginning of the Christian era." Gould's most recent biographer presented him as misunderstood. But to understand is to forgive, and Beatty is having none of that. "Age of Betrayal" presents Gould as a monster of capitalism, corrupting America's once-promising democracy. Gould, who died in 1892, reposes in a splendid mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. One would not be surprised to find Beatty lurking nearby with a wooden stake and a mallet. Gould might have had more on his conscience than even Beatty suspects. I lived for two years in West Texas, where I absorbed some stray historical facts, including this one: In early July 1881, Gould's work crews on the Texas & Pacific Railroad reached the halfway point as they laid track between Fort Worth and El Paso. They paused there long enough to found the future city of Midland, where - seven decades later - a Connecticut native named George W. Bush would spend most of his childhood, absorbing a cowboy ethos that had little relevance to Midland's white-collar reality. So there you have it, conspiracy theorists: the origins of the faux-West world from which our current president sprang can be traced to Beatty's archvillain, Jay Gould. The ersatz West brings us directly to Heather Cox Richardson and "West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America After the Civil War." In her epilogue, Richardson argues that Bush is the latest beneficiary of a Gilded Age realignment that enshrined the frontier myth at the core of America's collective identity. "George W. Bush promised to be a cowboy president," she writes. "He vowed to cut through government red tape, cut taxes, slash budgets, take government out of the hands of special interests and retain America's standing as God's chosen land, even as he spread liberty and humanity abroad. All of these promises had been the rallying cries of first Southerners and Westerners, and then mainstream Americans in general in the late-19th century." Richardson, who teaches history at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, covers the same ground as Beatty but with a less polemical slant. She also pays more attention to women activists. But her main emphasis is her reworking of Frederick Jackson Turner's thesis that America was shaped by the frontier experience. To Richardson, it was Americans' romantic image of the West, more than their actual experience there, that redefined the nation during Reconstruction. By idealizing the West, Americans preserved their antebellum view of themselves as a community of rugged individualists. Thus was born the blinkered worldview of the modern middle class, which perceived itself in opposition to the undeserving poor and the grasping rich. "The powerful new American identity permitted many individuals to succeed far beyond what they might have achieved elsewhere," Richardson writes, "but that exceptional openness depended on class, gender and racial bias." All Gilded Age narratives enter the home stretch when they reach 1898, the year of the Spanish-American War. Beatty offers a hidebound Marxist analysis of this event as a war driven by capitalists' push for new markets. He rounds up his usual suspects, the plutocrats and their politician lackeys, for one last cudgeling. And here he ends his book, as the United States steps boldly into the global arena, having already vanquished the better angels of its nature. "The world deserved America," Beatty concludes sourly, "and America deserved the world." RICHARDSON falls more into the "psychic crisis" school of historiography. She sees the war as a self-affirming crusade mounted by the newly coalesced middle class, which stampeded the politicians right over the protesting plutocrats. (Pace Beatty, most industrialists initially opposed the war as bad for business.) In Richard son's telling, most Americans viewed the conflict as a new kind of Wild West adventure on a newly opened overseas frontier. Perhaps inevitably, Richardson concludes her book by drawing a parallel between Theodore Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill and Bush sending the cavalry into Iraq. If that sounds like a stretch, consider this piece of recent evidence: A few months ago, Bush was pictured on the front page of this newspaper, defending his Iraq policy while standing beneath a portrait of Roosevelt on horseback in full Rough Rider regalia. If history really is repeating itself, then our current Gilded Age will soon give way to the next cycle. Apparently, the canny Rove is retiring McKinley and moving on to Roosevelt, just in time for a new Progressive Era. For Richardson, the Gilded Age enshrined the frontier myth; for Beatty it was a time of bought government. Mark Lewis is writing a book about America's colonial experience in the Philippines.
