The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896

The Oxford History of the United States #7

by Richard White

The Oxford History of the United States is the most respected multivolume history of the American nation. In the newest volume in the series, The Republic for Which It Stands, acclaimed historian Richard White offers a fresh and integrated interpretation of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as the seedbed of modern America.

At the end of the Civil War the leaders and citizens of the victorious North envisioned the country's future as a free-labor republic, with a homogenous citizenry, both black and white. The South and West were to be reconstructed in the image of the North. Thirty years later Americans occupied an unimagined world. The unity that the Civil War supposedly secured had proved ephemeral. The country was larger, richer, and more extensive, but also more diverse. Life spans were shorter, and physical well-being had diminished, due to disease and hazardous working conditions. Independent producers had become wage earners. The country was Catholic and Jewish as well as Protestant, and increasingly urban and industrial. The "dangerous" classes of the very rich and poor expanded, and deep differences-ethnic, racial, religious, economic, and political-divided society. The corruption that gave the Gilded Age its name was pervasive.

These challenges also brought vigorous efforts to secure economic, moral, and cultural reforms. Real change-technological, cultural, and political-proliferated from below more than emerging from political leadership. Americans, mining their own traditions and borrowing ideas, produced creative possibilities for overcoming the crises that threatened their country.

In a work as dramatic and colorful as the era it covers, White narrates the conflicts and paradoxes of these decades of disorienting change and mounting unrest, out of which emerged a modern nation whose characteristics resonate with the present day.

Genres: History, American History, Nonfiction, Politics, American, The United States Of America, Civil War

962 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 2017

About the author

Richard White is the author of many acclaimed histories, including the groundbreaking study of the transcontinentals, Railroaded, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Emeritus, at Stanford University, and lives near Palo Alto, California.

Reviews

[Max · Rating 4 out of 5]

White’s tome covers three decades, 1865 to 1896, in 850 pages. It is the latest volume of the Oxford History of the United States. I have read several of the others and found this one a bit dry, but it was worthwhile. I knew some of the themes of the period such as reconstruction, Jim Crow, robber barons, gilded age, etc., but wanted a better understanding of how it all fit together. Now I realize how dramatic the change was in those three decades. This was the period that gave birth to modern America. No longer was America represented by Lincoln’s iconic log cabin, but rather Carnegie’s steel mills. The frontier was gone and so was the mid-century Anglo Protestant vision of the country. A diverse America formed as immigrants from all over Europe filled teeming cities in the North and Midwest, white farmers replaced Native Americans on the plains, Jim Crow replaced slavery in the South, and Chinese laborers were imported and exploited in the West. My notes follow.

Following the Civil War much more was changing than the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction. The war led to a vast increase in federal power. The industrial revolution unleashed big business. The West was opening up. The Irish, Germans and Chinese were bringing their cultures to America while former slaves tried to eke out a living and native peoples were driven from their homes. Northern classical liberal Republicans had assumed their victory meant a tidy Protestant egalitarian small town America as blacks and Indians were assimilated. They would find their simplistic notion cast asunder. Racism, nativism, endemic corruption, ruthless competition and greed would tear at the country’s fabric. As White puts it, in the three decades following the Civil War America was “…a country transformed by immigration, urbanization, environmental crisis, political stalemate, new technologies, the creation of powerful corporations, income inequality, failures of governance, mounting class conflict, and increasing social, cultural, and religious diversity.” This is an equally apt description of America today.

White starts with Lincoln’s funeral and quickly moves onto the impeachment of Andrew Johnson. The question revolved around the exercise of federal power in the South. If federal soldiers didn’t show up with guns, plantation owners had no reason to release their slaves. When they finally did they turned them into dependent sharecroppers and tenant farmers. Blacks who disagreed, wanted to vote, or otherwise got out of line were beaten, killed, raped, and put into forced labor. Johnson was against slavery because it hurt poor whites. A former slave owner from Tennessee, he was no friend of the freedmen and deferred to former Confederates to again assume local power. In 1868 Grant was elected. He used more but still woefully inadequate force to protect the freedmen. Federal troops in the South soon left with most going home and others heading west to the Mexican border or to fight the Indians.

The Grant administration was beset by massive corruption, which had also been widespread in prior administrations and would continue in succeeding administrations. His Secretary of War was on the take along with many others skimming funds for administration of the Indians. Grant’s personal secretary and many in the IRS were enriching themselves with bribes from whiskey manufacturers to overlook taxes. Congress also got into the act passing laws to enrich themselves particularly with stocks and bonds from the railroads. Congressmen such as Oakes Ames claimed that these were not bribes but merely gifts exchanged by friends.

Railroads became large corporations run by unscrupulous financiers that used their wealth to buy politicians, intimidate opponents, exploit workers and control markets. The railroads spawned the industrial complex that would dominate the country. Allied industries that supplied, steel, coal, petroleum, wood and locomotives grew alongside the RRs typically aligned in monopolistic agreements. The scale of manufacturing was changing from the little shop to the large factory, from the personal to the impersonal, from the skilled worker to the unskilled laborer. These low paid unskilled laborers could barely make ends meet. Living in ever larger cities, when they lost a job, often many others did too. No longer could a man just head to the countryside, cut wood or split rails as Lincoln did, to tide him over.

The Panic of 1873 began a depression that lasted five years. This was the beginning of unemployment as it would occur in the future, a recession or depression resulting in masses of unskilled urban laborers with no hope of finding work. Global interdependencies were already in place. The panic of 1873 began in Europe then spread to America where the massive debt of the railroads caused them and the banks that financed them to fail. When RR construction stopped, industries that supplied them also failed. The next shoe to drop was the Great Strike of 1877. Railroads trying to maintain shareholder dividends, cut wages up to 20%, extended working hours, and changed rules reducing job security. Workers in cities across America rose up, stopping train traffic and destroying RR property. Militias opened fire, hundreds died, and federal troops were called in. This could be considered the first red scare as company executives feared a reprise of the Paris commune of five years earlier. Many of the railroads had to capitulate on wages, the public sympathized with the workers, and the labor movement finally began to seriously organize.

Another subjugated group was organizing in the 1870s: Women. Married women in America essentially had no rights. Under the prevailing doctrine of coverture, when a women married she no longer could enter into contracts or own separate property. Everything was her husband’s, even the children if she wanted to leave. With male drunkenness epidemic, a man could spend the entire household’s money and beat his wife with impunity. Thus was born the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) founded in 1874 which would become the largest women’s organization in the country under the leadership of Frances Willard. In addition to abstinence from alcohol the WCTU also fought for women’s suffrage, against polygamy which was viewed as slavery, against prostitution including prosecuting the Johns, and to raise the age of consent which was ten years old in twenty states and seven in in one state.

Fueled by huge government land grants, the railroads opened up Middle America, and the number and size of farms grew rapidly. Native Americans were eliminated to make way, many were killed, and the few left were remanded to reservations where many died of starvation and disease. Chinese were imported under harsh contracts to lay the tracks. With the Indians removed, the Great Plains were plowed up with rainfall the arbiter of success or failure. The best lands were very productive and soon taken. Wheat, pork and beef, carried by rail and ship, fed not only America but Europe. The new farmers were often immigrants from Europe. Marginal lands were abandoned after being environmentally degraded.

In the cities massive immigration from Ireland and to a lesser extent Germany was upsetting the cultural landscape. The Irish were extremely poor and considered scum by Northern Republican “liberals” who felt only they were competent to govern. The Irish and many Germans brought Catholicism upsetting the evangelical Protestant community and its notion of an ideal America. Secularism rose in America, not out of harmony, but conflict, particularly to stop funding for Catholic schools in an America where the King James Bible was being taught in most public schools. Free blacks, Indians, Irish, Germans, Chinese and people who didn’t speak English did not fit into preconceived notions of what America should be. Population in America doubled between 1861 and 1891. In 1870, 25% of Americans lived in cities. In 1900, 40% of the now significantly larger American population lived in cities. Cities grew uncontrollably.

Average native born white male height declined an inch from 1830 to 1870 hitting bottom in the 1880s. Native born white male life expectancy began to decline in the 1790s and began to slowly reverse in the 1890s. Abysmal sanitation, contaminated water, adulterated food, inadequate nutrition and resultant disease were culprits that largely affected urban residents, particularly the poor who often survived on bread and sweets. Ice and the availability of refrigeration was a primary factor reversing the trend in the 1890s. Rural residents outside the South enjoyed much better health. Housing for unskilled workers in cities often consisted of 400 to 500 square foot hovels near the workplace such as a packinghouse or steel mill with their unregulated pollution of the skies and streams. In New York City, five story tenements with small dark rooms were constructed one after the other. They were filled with the intended poor who also then took in poorer roomers to make ends meet. Common shared privies were in the basement. Water did not go above the first floor.

In the 1880s extensive gerrymandering, as is the case today, was the norm. The southern and western states also garnered outsized influence. New western states like Montana and Wyoming got two senators but had little more than 100,000 residents. In the South, blacks were counted as part of the population but denied the right to vote, so white southerners effectively had more congressmen per capita than people in other states. WCTU president Frances Willard epitomized the lost interest of northerners in civil rights. A daughter of abolitionists, she aligned closely with evangelical Protestants and while supporting white women’s suffrage, she supported limiting the voting rights of black and immigrant men who she regarded as ignorant and immoral. Indian lands continued to be taken to make room for settlers. Those that even appeared to resist were run off or killed as happened at the massacre at Wounded Knee. Indians were not citizens and had no rights. They were also caught up in the battle between Catholics and Protestants over who would “civilize” them.

In 1886 labor flexed its newfound muscle. Working conditions, housing and wages for workers were unlivable. In what has been called the Great Upheaval 600,000 workers engaged in 1,400 different strikes. The largest of many unions, the Knights of Labor had grown rapidly to 729,000 members. The Knights had gained fame defeating the cutthroat RR owner Jay Gould in one strike, but he got the government to break the strikers in the Great Southwest Strike, the largest that year. Chicago was the epicenter of labor unrest with multiple strikes in 1886 ending with an anarchist throwing a bomb killing police and resulting in controversial hangings of the perpetrator’s associates. The bomb thrower had gotten away, so the authorities executed his friends.

Andrew Carnegie presented himself as an enlightened philanthropist, but he ran his steel mill conglomerate (later becoming U.S. Steel) with an iron fist. Working conditions were brutal. Workers were injured right and left, many died. They worked 12 hour days for bare survival wages that were continually being cut. After clashes with the unions at his plants in the late 1880’s, Carnegie decided to once and for all to break them at the Homestead plant in Pittsburgh in 1892. Carnegie brought in hundreds of Pinkertons to battle the workers. Once that failed an 8,000 man force of the state militia run by a general who considered the workers communists was brought in. After extensive violence that went on for months and drew worldwide attention, out of food and out of hope, the strikers gave up. Carnegie won continuing to make his huge fortune on the backs of the workers while being protected from foreign competition by the high tariffs put in place by the politicians he paid for in Washington.

What was known as the Great Depression before the depression of the 1930s started in 1893. Several problems precipitated the depression. The trigger was a poor cotton harvest which came on top of European banks skittishness over their loans to American RRs which were deeply in debt. This was exacerbated by continued deflation due to the gold standard and the lack of an American central bank. Unable to get loans, RRs failed right and left. Hundreds of banks failed. The NY Stock Exchange sold off in a panic. Farmers could not get credit to plant or harvest. George Pullman’s factory that employed thousands who built RR cars was hit hard. Pullman like Carnegie thought of himself as an enlightened employer but like Carnegie he cut employee wages before dividends. When strikers and supporters began blocking RR traffic, the courts used the Sherman Antitrust Act against the unions. Violence erupted and thousands of federal troops were called in to settle it. One outcome of the depression was the increase in corporate mergers. On top of Rockefeller’s oil refining, Carnegie’s steel behemoth and the RRs, American business across the board concentrated into large corporate entities leading the way into the twentieth century. Dean Howells, the influential editor and author, was a lifelong Republican, but now his political views were changing in light of the extreme income inequality. He wondered about the future of democracy asking, “Are we a plutocracy?”

In the late 1880s and 90s immigrants flooded in from Eastern and Southern Europe, many were Jews and Catholics from Russia, Poland and Italy. They were different from the Irish Catholics and the German Jews that preceded them. They stoked anti-immigrant sentiment and were racially stereotyped as they populated the tenements. The nativists began pushing to restrict them from entering the country. Also growing was a middle class. They fueled the beginning of modern consumption notably including entertainment and sports. The new generation growing up was crazy about baseball. Entertainment venues, whether the circus, baseball, football, horseracing, boxing and more were following big business in their structure, employing modern advertising methods and becoming the entities we would recognize today. As 1896 approached an era was ending. The Republican, McKinley, representing the status quo and big business was elected. He was the last president to have served in the Civil War. He took the reins of a country that would have been barely recognizable to the people of Lincoln’s time.

[Dmitri · Rating 4 out of 5]

“This is a country for white men, and by God, as long as I am President, it will remain a country for white men.” - President Andrew Johnson, 1865, about granting black men the right to vote

“The Indians are dying. We kill them if they attempt to hunt and if they keep within the reservation they starve.” - General William Tecumseh Sherman, US Army

“We took away their country and their means of support, broke up their mode of living, their habits of life, introduced disease and decay among them. It was for this and against this they made war. Could anyone expect less?” - General Philip Sheridan, US Army

“It is downright mockery to talk to women of enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing it provided by this democratic-republican government: the ballot.” - Susan B. Anthony

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Post-Civil War Reconstruction was imagined by Republicans of the era as a society where the South and the West would be remade in the image of the North, uncorrupted by forced rivalry with slaves, Americans living and working in peaceful communities without poverty or income inequality. By 1873 Mark Twain would observe in his novel ‘Gilded Age’ that the ideal was replaced by greed, corruption and crass politics. It was an age of vast industrialization, with African Americans re-enslaved by Jim Crow laws and Native Americans all but eradicated on the frontier. The Republican administrations that followed were the obedient servants of robber barons as average Americans became wage slaves.

Lincoln’s Funeral
When John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln on Good Friday in 1865 many saw him as a martyr for the sin of slavery. Tracing Lincoln’s funeral train from Washington DC to Springfield, Illinois author Richard White sees an analogy to the American dream in his rise from a log cabin to White House. Vice President Andrew Johnson had assumed the presidency in his wake and began a rebuilding of the South. Discharging soldiers too early the army was unable to stop nightriders from terrorizing freed people. Ex-Confederate soldiers took an oath of allegiance to the Union and states reformed their governments. Blacks were unable to vote as Johnson appointed governors under war powers.

Forty Acres and a Mule
A Freedman’s Bureau was set up to provide medical, legal and educational aid, and distribute confiscated land in forty acre plots. Under Lincoln’s rump cabinet most available land was appropriated by carpetbaggers, speculators and poor whites. Blacks who couldn’t obtain land were left to sell their labor by contract to land owners who had formerly enslaved them. The bitterness over loss of slaves and the resentment to the federal government persisted. Vagrancy laws were enacted in the South where blacks who neglected their work contract, or didn’t have one, could be arrested and hired out as forced labor. Children separated from parents labored as apprentices in a recreation of pre-Civil War slavery.

Scalawags and Carpetbaggers
The 14th Amendment of 1868 granted rights of citizenship to all people born or naturalized in the US. Violence broke out in the South with lynch mobs and policemen killing blacks and reformers. In 1866 the Ku Klux Klan had been founded as an armed wing of the Democratic Party. Scalawags were poor southern whites who sided with northern Republicans and freedmen in favor of universal male suffrage, opposing the southern elites and plantation owners. The US Army was needed to protect Republican candidates and black people. Johnson was impeached for thwarting the Reconstruction efforts and replaced by Ulysses S. Grant during the 1868 election. By 1870 black men had won the right to vote.

Railroaders and Speculators
The Homestead Act of 1862 sought to create infrastructure for 2/3’s of the country by offering free land to anyone who could farm it for five years. Sparsely populated, the West was claimed but not controlled by the government. The US Army was the sole administrative tool, with only 30,000 soldiers spread over the South and lands west of the Mississippi, and was unable to provide security for the Pacific Railway Act. To raise funds in the postwar economy land was divided into 1 mile squares along the tracks, half sold and half given away to the railroad company, generating tax free development. In a decade companies acquired land the size of medium states. The system was rife with fraud and incompetence.

Indian Wars
After a massacre of 200 Cheyenne women and children in Colorado by the US Army the ongoing Indian Wars escalated across the Great Plains before the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. In response to violated treaties and threatened hunting grounds Lakota leader Red Cloud laid siege to a fort on the Oregon trail and killed 80 US soldiers. The goal was to open a corridor for the trans-continental railroad, to relocate and civilize the Native Americans, culminating in the 1876 Battle of Little Bighorn where Custer was defeated and 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre where 300 non-warrior natives were slaughtered. Along the way tribes were moved to ever smaller reservations, dying from conflicts and disease.

Captains of Industry
America adopted laissez-faire liberalism based on the sacred precepts of small government, lax oversight and widespread crony capitalism. Laws against bribery were in place but they were circumvented by reduced price stock options and inside trading. The railroad men Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie, banker JP Morgan and oil man John D. Rockefeller were beneficiaries of government largess, as well as many other less known tycoons. Labor protests over working hours and wage reductions led to a bomb in Chicago’s Haymarket Square and strikes across the country against the Pullman railroad car company. Thousands of US troops and marshals were called in to break up the protesters, killing hundreds.

Richard White concludes with a comparison of Springfield, Illinois at the time of Lincoln’s funeral in 1865 and the Chicago of the World’s Colombian Exposition of 1893. Abe’s vision of an egalitarian society of free labor and general prosperity had been replaced with monopolies and factories spewing smoke from grimy chimneys, wealth disparity and poverty. The White City had been lit up with electricity but African-Americans were denied entrance. Women would have to wait a quarter century to vote, a half century after black men. Irish and German immigrants, Catholics and Jews and others had doubled the population. The time was near when the “Empire of Liberty” would be projected abroad.

[Michael Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

If this seems familiar, there'a a good reason, we are living in a new Gilded Age of excess wealth and corruption.

Update: Apple CEO Tim Cook's pay package this year is $99m.

And U.S. Billionaires Got 62 percent Richer During the Pandemic. They’re Now Up $1.8 Trillion.

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Review from WSJ....

In the Gettysburg Address, in 1863, Lincoln promised “a new birth of freedom” for all Americans. As Richard White notes in “The Republic for Which It Stands,” a sweeping history of postwar 19th-century America, the Civil War did indeed give birth to a new nation, as Lincoln had promised, but in many ways it was not the one he had wished for.

Instead of a prosperous free-labor republic of independent citizens—taking their place in a “largely egalitarian society,” as White puts it—a very different America emerged, one that was radically transformed and freshly stratified. Because of new methods of production, new ways of organizing work and stunning accumulations of capital, the nation’s gross domestic product swelled to $320 billion at the end of the century from $69 billion in 1860. Along the way, White argues, a new, fabulously wealthy elite took charge of the economy and government.

In the decades after the war, investment poured into infrastructure, farming and capital goods. Many of the country’s major corporations were formed: U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, General Electric. Exports boomed. Food production soared. Railroads “spidered across the American landscape,” as White nicely puts it, opening the West to settlement, connecting the nation into a single market, and making it possible to haul crops and consumer goods almost anywhere in the United States. New mail-order companies such as Sears Roebuck offered shoppers from Maine to California everything from ready-made clothing to prefabricated houses. Federal support for homesteading opened once inaccessible reaches of the West to settlement. The America of 1900 was a far more dynamic country than it was in 1865.

At the same time, however, tides of immigration and breakneck urbanization turned large swaths of American cities into crowded, disease-ridden slums. Political corruption flourished. Tariffs, massive land grants and subsidies to railroads facilitated a flow of public resources into private hands and protected industries. Homesteading expedited the displacement of Indian tribes and led to the destruction of millions of acres that were too dry to be farmed. (Almost 50% of homesteads ended in failure within a few years.) Meanwhile, the promises of security and full citizenship made to freed slaves were largely forgotten. By the 1890s, White asserts, the U.S. was less egalitarian and less democratic than it had been at the end of the Civil War.

American character changed, too. White provocatively suggests that a tectonic shift in outlook can be inferred from the seemingly mundane sphere of life insurance. Between 1860 and 1870, the 43 life-insurance companies in the U.S. swelled to no fewer than 163. “Where once Americans had embraced providence,” he writes, “they now hedged it. Life had become property, and it belonged in an insurance company’s hands rather than God’s.”

In the course of White’s overarching political and economic narrative, he draws sharp portraits of the men and women who peopled the Gilded Age. He is especially good at bringing color to the era’s monochromatic politicians, like the perennial Republican presidential aspirant James G. Blaine. As E.L. Godkin remarked at the time, Blaine’s “audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable.” Blaine finally got his chance in 1884 but gratuitously insulted critical Irish voters, hobnobbed with big-money men and went down to defeat at the hands of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War. Cleveland, for his part, was “a man spectacularly unsuited by temperament and belief for his time and his place,” White writes. In the wake of the 1894 elections, which resulted in crippling losses for the Democrats, the overweight Cleveland “resembled a harpooned whale; whatever power he had was exhausted and the Republicans could haul him in and dispose of him when his term expired.”

White’s cast of characters includes titans of finance and industry such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, George Pullman and the ruthless railroad magnate Collis Huntington ; William Jennings Bryan, the prairie Populist; assorted labor leaders, such as Terence Powderly, the Catholic temperance man who built the Knights of Labor; reformers and women’s-rights advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard ; big-city crooks and political con men such as New York’s Boss Tweed; the brave African-American journalist Ida Wells, who forced the epidemic of Southern lynchings into the consciousness of Americans; and the showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who marketed enactments of “Old West” scenes while embracing up-to-date advertising methods.

White builds the central armature of his narrative around the rise and fall of the “liberal” wing of the Republican Party, which dominated the postwar era. In contrast to our own time, the term “liberal” then referred to people who embraced aggressive capitalism and distrusted a strong federal government. Liberals were also defined by their near-religious belief in the gold standard, which, they believed, ensured economic stability and economic progress. The proponents of a silver-based currency—broadly speaking Democrats, farmers and debtors—argued, by contrast, that gold was inherently deflationary, concentrating money and credit in the Northeast and starving the West and South of agricultural credit. Gold and silver, White observes, “became icons of deep beliefs and ways to talk about civilization, morality, [and] progress.”

Liberals generally supported lenient policies toward the former Confederate South and opposed federal efforts to protect former slaves from white violence. Even as Southern blacks were being slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation magazine, the leading voice of liberalism, loftily asserted: “The removal of white prejudice against the negro depends almost entirely on the negro himself.”

Around the same time, filth and rampant disease were exacting their own toll. “Nineteenth-century Americans were a sickly people,” White observes, citing statistical data; most notably, they died earlier than their antebellum forebears. Waterborne diseases became increasingly lethal; cholera in particular took hold in cities that seemed carpeted with rotting garbage, fetid water and decaying animal carcasses. In 1880 alone, New York City removed nearly 15,000 dead horses from its streets.

Increasingly, however, under pressure from reformers, cities began to accept the cleaning up of foul streets and rivers as a public responsibility. White manages to make even the development of urban sewage and water systems engrossing through his deft interweaving of engineering challenges, hard-nosed city politics and shifting social values. Not only did modern water treatment improve public health; it also fostered the rise of industries whose products required clean water. The Coca-Cola Co., for instance, owed its success largely to its innovative condensation of its formula into a syrup that could be shipped by rail to franchisees, who infused it with cheap, clean soda water.

Gilded Age Americans, for the most part, were thrilled by their nation’s economic dynamism, but by the last decade of the century there was a widespread sense that political institutions had been corrupted by plutocrats. White writes, summarizing the self-serving ethics epitomized by the financier J.P. Morgan: “A man of character might be dissipated, lie, cheat, steal, and either order or condone deeds punishable by time in a penitentiary, but he did not do those things to his friends.” Many liberals, with their belief in laissez-faire, had expected, White says, “a self-regulating order.” But they got instead “near chaos,” as poverty bred labor unrest and unrest bloodshed when federal troops cracked down on strikes.

Reformers demanded clean government and the regulation of corporations. Figures with reformist instincts, like Theodore Roosevelt, were on the rise inside the Republican Party, and populist Democrats were newly energized, such as the silver-tongued Bryan and the soon-to-be socialist Eugene Debs. Antimonopolists, “the largest and broadest of the era’s reform groupings,” White writes, looked to government to regulate railroads, clamp down on corruption, develop exacting administrative procedures, and build municipal water and sewage systems. As the author William Dean Howells, whose trajectory from enthusiastic liberal to troubled reformer epitomizes the evolution of elite thinking, wrote in 1895: “Liberty and poverty are incompatible.”

History rarely delivers an unambiguous lesson. But in this monumental yet highly readable book, White has given us a panorama of an age that in many ways seems like our own. The volcanic turmoil of the late 19th century did much to shape the world that we live in today, with its creative and destructive cycles of industry, its quickening technological change, its extremes of wealth and poverty, its struggle to impose fairness in the jungle of the marketplace, its tug of war between freedom and regulation in the public interest. “The Republic for Which It Stands” is, in no small part, the story of how we came to be who we are. (less)

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"One of the ironies of the Gilded Age was that during this period the United States both completed the four-centuries-long conquest of Indian peoples by Europeans and their descendants and then treated Indians like immigrant Europeans: a people to be acculturated and assimilated."

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Henry Flagler, Presbyterian partner to the Baptist John Rockefeller, had this sign on his desk that read:

"Do unto others as they would do unto you----and do it first."

[CoachJim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the fifth volume of The Oxford History of the United States series. It is a survey of American History from the end of the Civil War until the election of William McKinley in 1896. It covers the Reconstruction and the transition into the Gilded Age. As the editor of this series states in the introduction the challenges and dilemmas it describes “echo robustly in our own time.”

It essentially follows the transformation of the Republican Party from the Anti-Slavery party of Lincoln to our modern day anti-democratic party.

As a survey it covers a multitude of developments. It describes social, political, cultural, religious, and other domestic issues of the period. One noticeable absence was the mention of any foreign developments during this time. Even at just shy of 900 pages it does not offer much depth or analysis of the period.

Prior to the Civil War America was considered the land of Jeffersonian Yeoman. These were independent subsistence farmers that made up the backbone of Jefferson’s idea of Democracy. After the Civil War the urbanization of America, and especially the influx of immigrants led to a more wage-labor class population.

Throughout the book the importance of the home to Americans is mentioned. Whether thought of as the home depicted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin or in the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder, it represented the soul of America and Americans. As the settlers cleared the land they built a cabin that would eventually become a farmhouse and outbuildings. The home represented the concepts of manhood and womanhood. The man would provide for his family and the woman would bear and raise children. “The home is the central force of civilization, and next to religion, the most powerful of all its agencies.” Private property, the nuclear family, and gendered labor was the American ideal.

Americans regarded land as essential to personal independence and independent citizens. Former slaves were led to believe that they would be granted 40 acres and a mule. This would have been consistent with the belief that the home was so central. However, the government was hesitant to take land from White men and give it to Black men. There was no hesitation when it came to taking land from the Red man and giving it White men. Also where the government was reluctant to use Federal Troops to enforce laws in the South when it came to defending the rights of blacks, there was no reluctance to use Federal troops to suppress Indians defending their land. The idea of giving 40 acres away is a joke when compared to the millions of acres they gave the railroads.

The settling of the West brought many environmental problems. The belief was held that “rain would follow the plow”. When this didn’t happen we ended up with an eroded prairie; as the minerals were mined we ended up with acres of destroyed landscape; draining wetlands led to water problems in other areas — the water has to go somewhere. Here, as continues to be the case today, the gains were private and the costs were public.

The social conflicts in this period were evidence of the division that plagues us today. Southerns against freedmen, workers against employers, whites against Indians, immigrants against the native-born, Protestants against Catholics, Californians against the Chinese, and sometimes women against men.

The book explains the rise of Liberal theology which viewed progress as a bottom-up as opposed to a government led top-down program. Liberals in the nineteenth century embraced minimal government, a free market economy, individualism, and property rights. Liberals in the nineteenth century would be called conservatives in the twenty-first century. They regarded laissez-faire as a philosophy for government. “Classical liberalism was metamorphosing into modern conservatism.”

Following Grant’s re-election in 1972 economic concerns became important. The Civil War had led to an increase in manufacturing and railroads that dominated the economy. There was a panic in 1973 caused by some global economic factors which in turn leads to a 5 year depression in the United States. Now some infamous financiers start playing with the economy. The Holding Companies appear which allows these financiers to control several companies and strip them of their assets.

And then there was the Gilded Age. As America became more urban many people were no longer independent producers, craftsmen, or farmers. They were wage laborers. They no longer had control over what their work was worth, or their working conditions, or their working hours. Employers saw the waves of poor immigrants as cheap labor willing to work in dangerous jobs, like the coal mines or steel mills. Also as monopolies gain power it was their quite visible hand rather than the invisible hand of a free market economy that controlled prices.

The question is raised as to why in the presence of great wealth and highly developed production was poverty the greatest. The failure and lack of distribution of the benefits were most evident in the tenements, which were as “antithetical to the American ideas of the home as they were hospitable to tuberculosis, typhoid. dysentery, and other waterborne diseases.”

The lack of depth and analysis became apparent when writing about the reform movement. Where abolitionist had succeeded in ending slavery, the reform movement was so scattered in its goals that nothing changed. However, I am aware that many of these reforms eventually succeeded, but not until well into the twentieth century, a period beyond the scope of this volume.

By the late 1800s the new corporate economy had appeared. This differed somewhat from the contract freedom and independence of employees viewed by the liberal Republicans. There was an undeniable productivity and an industrial infrastructure in place, but this had led to wage labor dependence not independence. It also created a chaotic economy plagued by boom and bust. There was also the presence of the very rich and the very poor. For many Americans the health and well-being had grown worse, not better. This was most apparent in the cities where poverty and environmental problems contrasted with the technology and gaudy wealth.

The United States was no longer a place of small government and independent production. Wage labor had made the workers dependent laborers often unable to provide for and protect their home. The health and well-being of the urban home was no longer possible solely through the labor of the husband or the skilled housekeeping of the wife. Clean water and air, the removal of waste and sewage, and protection from disease became the responsibility of municipal governments.

Eventually the difference in the political parties is made clear by William Jennings Bryan. In his Cross of Gold speech he states:

“There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it.”

This trickle down theory of an economy is the same we saw in the Reagan presidency and we all know how that turned out.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard White's The Republic for Which It Stands is the latest entry in the Oxford History of the United States, covering the three decades between Lincoln's assassination and McKinley's election. During this hectic, confused time period, America tried desperately to bind the nation's sectional wounds after a devastating Civil War, while leaving racial and class divisions untouched, even worsened. This is the main through-line of White's book, viewing Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as part of one continuum: he views the rise of liberal economics, emphasizing free enterprise and economic development as the way forward, as inherently detrimental to the causes of racial and social equality and good government. It's to argue against much of this, though White overstates elements of his case, especially in his embracing the old, largely-defunct caricature of Ulysses Grant as a crooked do-nothing. Still, White shows the massive corruption, westward imperialism and bigotry (from Jim Crow laws in the South to anti-Chinese hysteria on the West Coast) resulting from such the abandonment of idealism for profit and power; the only bright spot, such as it was, is that the Gilded Age generated a backlash in terms of labor movements, racial and feminist activism and Populism (real or debased) that ultimately laid the seeds for the Progressive Era.

[robin friedman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reconstruction And The Gilded Age In The Oxford History Of The United States

The Oxford History of the United States is a multivolume history of the American nation each of which is written by an acclaimed scholar. Each volume aims to present a thorough, comprehensive, contemporary view of its subject which is accessible to both scholars and lay readers. Founded by C. Vann Woodward and Richard Hofstadter and now under the direction of David Kennedy, the series, as the publisher's blurb aptly points out "blends social, political, economic, cultural, diplomatic, and military history into coherent and vividly written narrative."

The tenth and most recent volume in the series, "The Republic for which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865 -- 1896", in the words of David Kennedy, "meets -- indeed exceeds" the high standards of the series in bringing "the most comprehensive and current historical scholarship to experts as well as to the general reader." The author, Richard White, is Margaret Byrne Professor of American History at Stanford University and a renowned scholar of the American West. Among other books, White is the author of "Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America" (2012) which I have read and reviewed here. The West and the railroads play prominent roles, as they must, in this new broader-based book. White's 900-page study offers a comprehensive, informed, and personal history of the roughly 30 years of American history from the death of Lincoln in 1865 to the election of William McKinley to the presidency in 1896. In my review of "Railroaded". I noted the polemical character of some of White's views and what I saw as his tendency to engraft current values onto an earlier historical period. These traits, as well as the ever-present and over-worked irony of our generation, are apparent in this new study. The traits were most apparent to me in the earlier sections of the book. As the work went on, however, I became absorbed in the study, as White says he did himself as he immersed himself in his subject. Whatever presentism and irony I found in the initial approach became less intrusive as I became involved in the period and in White's history.

"The Republic for which it Stands" is a long book which fulfills the historian's mission of creating an intellectual reconstruction of the past. The book is as multi-themed and varied as the period which it studies. White's book is in three large parts. Part l, "Reconstructing the Nation" begins with the death of Lincoln, examines the Reconstruction policy of Andrew Johnson and of Congress, and explores the Southern reaction and the violence and the impact on the Freedpeople. The book examines Western expansion and Indian policy. There is also extensive discussion of economic and monetary policy and of ever-present corruption. Part I ends in 1876.

Part II, "The Quest for Prosperity" discusses a violent and divided America centered around the growth of large corporations. labor unrest, immigration, the suppression of African American voting, the conquest of the West, the ever-present corruption, and attempts at reform. The section describes in detail large scale strikes such as the Great Strike of 1877, the Homestead Steel Strike, and more. The Chicago international exposition of 1893 and its vision of progress is a centerpiece of this part.

Part III, "The Crisis Arrives" describes the increasing gap between the very wealthy and the very poor, and different utopian and dystopian visions of America. White describes the Great Depression of 1893, the Pullman Strike, the gold standard, and the failures of the second term of the Cleveland administration. (White is harsh on Grover Cleveland). The book shows the rise of William Jennings Bryan and the realignment of American politics with the election of McKinley.

The book covers a great deal, and in his Introduction and Conclusion, White works to pull his history together into a cohesive whole. Broadly, White sees a United States of double vision after the death of Lincoln. He argues that Lincoln, and his successors, saw the successor United States as based on the liberty of individuals to make contracts and to establish themselves economically and emotionally as independent, family units, rising as Lincoln did, from salaried employees to independence. White argues that this vision saw Americans as possessing essentially homogenous values best articulated in Protestantism and in small-town life (such as Lincoln's Springfield, Illinois). White finds the centerpiece of this view in a vision of the American family and in what he sees as the gendered roles of husband and wife in the family. This liberal vision, which effectively combated slavery, monarchy, and established religion, came in conflict with the changes wrought by the Civil War, and by the rise of the railroads and other corporations aided by corruption and by government largesse. The dream of liberalism and independence came into conflict with wage slavery, boom and bust, and environmental degradation. White sees throughout the book the rise of the antimonopoly movement in its various and often conflicting forms as the major reform effort of the era.

Another way in White unites his themes is through the use of literary and intellectual figures of the day. White makes insightful and creative use of the works of Henry Adams, William and Henry James, Mark Twain and Hamlin Garland, among many others. But the figure who stands out in White's history is the novelist and journalist William Dean Howells. Howells' receives attention throughout this history as emblematic of the age and of its changes. Howells began as a young man writing a campaign biography of Lincoln. He was a relatively moderate Republican early on but gradually moved, under the influence of what he saw as the disparities of wealth, the influence of Tolstoy and other factors to different types of positions which he expressed in his novels such as "The Rise of Silas Lapham", "A Hazard of New Fortunes" "A Traveler from Alturia" and in many essays and newspaper columns. Late in his life, in the 1890's, Howell's wrote, examining the period from Lincoln's death to the present, that "If American means anything at all, it means the sufficiency of the common, the insufficiency of the uncommon."

Howell's own intellectual journey, and his endorsement of "the sufficiency of the common" become themes of White's book as he argues for the importance of millions of men and women of modest means and attainments in the shaping of America in the late Nineteenth Century as opposed to the allegedly uncommon individuals such as financiers, corporate executives, inventors, and political leaders. White sees the period, and indeed the United States, as showing the rise of many diverse, unsung individuals rather than politicians, executives, or intellectuals.

The history of this period as recounted in White's book is messy and far from pretty or elevating. Yet underlying the book is a search for meaning in terms of both individual and national life resulting from a change in circumstances, economic and philosophical, and a search for new ideals. A sense of home and of love for the United States, which White says he "loves in his own perverse way" runs through the book. This book takes patience to read but it rewards the effort. An excellent bibliographical essay which discusses and comments upon many of the sources White used in writing the book shows the depth of writing about this period. White has written an outstanding book which helped me understand Reconstruction and the Gilded Age better and to think more deeply and carefully about American history.

Robin Friedman

[Brent · Rating 5 out of 5]

These 900 pages seem increasingly relevant to interpret our Gilded President: author Richard White and this fine book deserve your time and attention. We are reliving aspects of this history: division into rich and poor, tariffs on steel, debates over home, immigration, division over race, and corporate "personhood." If, like me, you devoured Ron Chernow's biography Grant, follow it up with this volume in the Oxford History of the United States.
Highest recommendation.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

This very detailed history pulls together all of the worst and some of the best in the political struggles of the growing country that grew out of the Civil War to eventually become the America we used to know and love.

For over 800 pages, from the death of President Lincoln to the election of McKinley, White keeps on slogging through each election cycle, each national policy controversy, each presidential candidate and scandal as if every issue were crucial to understanding what happened (and it is hard to say they were not). As you become familiar with how issues were argued then in light of the facts, you start to feel right at home with our present state of disinformation. I took some comfort from this, although as Marilynne Robinson would say, “I think history has indulged us, allowing us to get away with abusing the democratic system in ways it will not sustain forever.”

I would not call this history entertaining, but it was very, very informative, brimming with facts and very well documented. White gives the reader just enough specificity to hold the attention, sometimes with shock and horror, at other times with a long buried fact, or amusing aside. Although there are few graphics, the selection of campaign posters and political cartoons that are included are wonderfully illustrative and illuminating.

This history is a bold, unvarnished telling of what America used to be like and if we are unlucky, will soon be again.

So get out and VOTE!

[Richard Greene · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought this one as part of the reading of the Oxford History of the United States. Really didn't know much about the period after the Civil War, so I was looking forward to reading this one.

Thoughts:

*Strengths of the book are the way it addresses the post-Civil War period of mediocre leadership in the U.S. The Presidents are forgettable and the political squabbles seem petty as both major parties look stupid, racist, greedy and reprehensible.

*I imagine a time in history where the sun really didn't shine reading this book. Not a good era for the poor, immigrants, African Americans, women and Native Americans. Not that the preceding decades could have been any better. The Gilded Age looks like an awful time for anyone who didn't own a railroad, bank or steel company.

*Came away with a better understanding of how law was essentially used to protect property. Lots of discussion of old school "liberalism" and substantive due process. As someone who doesn't understand economics well, appreciated how White was able to connect the bigger issues like the tariff and the gold standard to the well-being of everyday Americans.

*Was particularly interested in Reconstruction, but came away thinking that Foner's Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 will be the better source of information - White relies so heavily on it.

*The discussion of "home" didn't appeal to me at all. Americans suddenly cared about home now? Never had heard "home" as some special unit in American thinking that arose in the post-Civil war period. I imagine I will never hear of it again anywhere else.

*Wasn't convinced that some of the characters that White spent a lot of time on (Alger, Willard, Howells) were worth the pages put into them. Book comes up really light on the bigger picture. Was hoping to see something more on the expansion into Alaska and Hawaii. More on international relations and incidents. This is really a book about labor relations, economics, elections and racism.

*Organization of the book leaves a lot to be desired. Took a lot of focus and perhaps a week longer than it should have to get through this one. Overall, it moves sequentially, but with each chapter heading, I never really knew what I was getting in to.

*Hard to get through a 900-pager and say, "It's missing something", but that's the feeling I came away with here. Granted, the Gilded Age is not the most exciting time in American history ("fly-over territory"). Can't give anything this long less than 3 stars, but it was a struggle to get through.

[Aaron Million · Rating 4 out of 5]

Richard White turns on a solid effort on the most recent entry of the Oxford History of the United States series. White covers the three decades immediately after the Civil War and they comprise a time period that saw the young nation basically reinvent itself. One of the constant themes running through the book is that of how much and how quickly the country changed after the war, so much so that, by the 1890s, it was almost unrecognizable from what it had been in 1865.

White begins in the immediate aftermath of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Indeed, the prologue is about the nation that Lincoln left behind, how his hometown of Springfield, IL was considered the quintessential American town at that time, and how (most of) the country went into mourning over his sudden death. White follows Lincoln’s long train ride home to IL, and how the country was in shock. Strangely enough though, White spends very little time on the trial of John Wilkes Booth’s fellow conspirators in the assassination. Considering that the top level of the federal government was almost decapitated, I thought he would pause here for a moment.

White quickly pivots to Reconstruction, but does not confine the coverage to just the South. For sure he discusses the destruction that was wrought by the war, and the ensuing white backlash against blacks now gaining their freedom. Although, I think “freedom” is a term to be used loosely considering how vicious many Southern whites were, with the rise of Jim Crow laws in conjunction with the Ku Klux Klan, and the growing disinterest of Northerners. White points out that, in some respects, very little had changed in parts of the South despite the elimination of slavery. Whites still tried to – and frequently did – dominate and control the lives of Southern blacks. While Reconstruction did see some gains in terms of black representation at the state and federal government levels, this was mostly short-lived and embittered Confederates lashed out with a vengeance at those blacks who dared to begin to exercise their newly found rights.

But White also focuses equal attention on a different area of the country in relation to Reconstruction: the West. He does a good job of comparing how the government went about reneging on treaties that it had forced on Native American tribes, brutally attacked them, and then forced them onto reservations after starving them out by depleting their natural food supply (buffaloes, in many areas). As the country increasingly took a hands-off approach in the South, especially once the late 1870s rolled around, it simultaneously took an active hand in reshaping the West be decimating the Native Americans and opening land to both white settlers and the railroads.

While Republicans controlled the presidency for almost all of this period, there were two Democrats as well (Andrew Johnson and Grover Cleveland). White makes it quite clear that he is unimpressed with the string of largely non-entity Presidents that inhabited the White House after Lincoln. Johnson, taking over after Lincoln’s assassination, quickly squandered any goodwill that the assassination had engendered, and rapidly moved towards conciliating the former Confederates. Johnson was a virulent racist, despite having stayed loyal to the Union during the War. He immediately ran afoul of the Radical Republicans who were in control of Congress, leading to a serious and almost successful impeachment attempt in 1868. Johnson barely survived by a single vote in the Senate, but White does not dwell too long here. I would have preferred him to have devoted more time to this rare occurrence, being that it was the first time that impeachment of a President had been attempted, but perhaps he felt that whether Johnson had been impeached or not, by that point he had done most all of the damage that he could do.

One area where I felt that White was somewhat off-base was in his disdainful treatment of Ulysses Grant. White makes it clear immediately that he considers Grant to have been a dreadful President. His coverage of the Grant presidency focuses on the corruption and bumbling of people in his administration, the ineptitude of trying to enforce Reconstruction in the South, and the awful treatment of Native Americans in the West. I don’t disagree here, and I certainly do not think that Grant was a great President. However, I am not sure that he was as much of a failure here as White makes him out to be. I noticed in the footnotes that White’s main biographical source on Grant is William McFeely’s biography of him. Having read that book, I know that McFeely was incredibly negative on Grant. And again, it is not unjustified. But having read more on Grant since then, I wonder if perhaps McFeely overdid it. As I think White does here. A few examples of White’s comments about Grant: On page 287 he writes “The saddest thing about his desire for a third term was that a man who had admitted he was unprepared for the presidency feared leaving it because he was equally unprepared for anything else.” Really? This is the man who helped craft a strategy to win the Civil War. On page 333, White writes “Grant left office under a shadow that shaped his revealing, odd, self-pitying, and very human final State of the Union message: ‘It is but reasonable to suppose errors of judgment [sic] must have occurred,’ he said, but he claimed his motives had been pure.” On page 378, writing about Grant’s post-presidential trip around the world, White says that “…Grant hoped [it] would dissipate the aroma of scandal and failure that clung to him like his cigar smoke.” And one final jab at Grant comes on page 462, with White writing about Grant’s Memoirs: “Fortunately, he ran out of time to write about his presidency.” Harsh! Too harsh for me. And uncalled for. These comments just seem petty.

The next President, Rutherford B. Hayes, does not fare much better, with White characterizing him as inconsistent in his stance on Reconstruction and supporting blacks, and basically lacking conviction for his actions. Next up is James Garfield, who is not President long due to being assassinated. On page 442 White dismisses him: “James Garfield had been a minor Civil War general, who had become a Republican politician from a major state, Ohio. He had a minor role in a major scandal, the Credit Mobilier. He died a minor president, whose term in office was short and inconsequential but contained the seed of major changes.” While that may also seem harsh, I don’t think it is nearly as much as White’s negativity towards Grant. And it is also pretty accurate.
Following Garfield was Chester Arthur, but if you blink you might miss him as he is barely in the narrative. Not without reason. Then comes two terms for Grover Cleveland, with one term for Benjamin Harrison sandwiched in between. White is not impressed with either of these guys either, and I can’t blame him as neither excelled in the office nor left much of a positive mark. I especially like White’s summation of Cleveland, on page 810: “In the wake of the elections, Cleveland resembled a harpooned whale, whatever power he had was exhausted and the Republicans could haul him in and dispose of him when his term expired.” I had to chuckle at that one.

One of White’s themes is that of an increasingly powerful federal government. White does a good job of explaining how the government expanded its power following the War, with one of the ways it went about doing that was by employing fee-based governance. That was the increasing amount of fees that the government charged for doing basically anything, and it was a way to generate revenue in days before an income tax.

Another theme is that of workers gradually losing control over their own lives and careers. This period saw the rise of huge factories and corporations such as Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel. While Lincoln and “liberals” (that term back then does not mean what it does today – in the Gilded Age it meant limited government in terms of labor and individual freedoms, much closer to what today would be considered a Libertarian view) expected that a free labor society post-slavery would enable every man (and yes, it was mainly men who were considered back then) to be free to decide what he does for a living, where he works, and who he decides to work for/with. But the reality turned out to be quite different, with people such as Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and Jay Gould accumulating fortunes while tamping down on workers’ rights. White is especially good with a chapter on the strikes at Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh and Homestead. Carnegie, despite acquiring a reputation for beneficence based on his funding of libraries across the country, treated his workers extremely bad, requiring twelve-hour days, dangerous working conditions, and subjecting them to wage cuts. Same thing with George Pullman in Chicago with his streetcar company. And the increasingly invasive federal government consistently came down on the side of capital, often with the courts deciding matters. A free labor dream of utopia collapsed.

But I do think that White focuses a bit too much on the liberals. His vehicle for this is the writer William Dean Howells. Quite frankly, Howells comes across as a rich snob who felt that interacting with the common man was cause for a bath. White returns to him throughout the book, partially to show how Howells’ thinking changed over time as the society that he had envisioned at the end of the War did not pan out. I thought White overdid his impact on this period, even though I do see why he chose Howells as someone to check in with periodically.

White covers two big cultural events that occurred during this time period: the Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition of 1876, and the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. With the former, I was wanting more, as White oddly chooses to focus his coverage of the event through the lens of a traveling French snob who clearly looked down his nose on Americans and anything American. In contrast, his coverage of the Chicago event was detailed and analytical.

Speaking of Chicago, White gave it the limelight quite a bit throughout the book, especially in my favorite chapter which was on the environmental condition and concerns of the late 19th century. White was excellent here, discussing in detail how large factories were beginning to pollute the air (he cites Carnegie Steel in Pittsburgh as an example) and water (he cites the meatpacking industry dumping toxic wastes into the Chicago River, which at that time flowed out into Lake Michigan, which was and still remains Chicago’s source of drinking water). He expands the chapter to discuss the ecological impacts on urban areas (think about sewage systems being installed), and then delves into how Americans’ lifespans during this time period actually decreased, and people were shorter in stature than both before and especially afterwards as we moved into the 20th century. I feel that this is an area that is way underexplored in studies about older periods in our history, and was glad to see White include it.

Another major theme of the book is that of immigration. Or, rather, anti-immigrant feeling by the people who considered themselves “Americans”. At this time, hysteria about and bigotry towards immigrants coming into the country was directed at those persons coming from Ireland and then far Eastern Europe. This was primarily on the East Coast and in the Midwest. On the West Coast, it was directed towards the Chinese. And, of course, Native Americans were not even considered to be people, but rather “savages” that needed to be assimilated into the white Protestant culture. This behavior was not just racial, although that was a huge part of it, but also religious, with much bias towards Catholics and Jewish immigrants. Reading these parts of the book made me sad because, one hundred and fifty years later – on that front at least – very little has changed as far as racism and bigotry goes. One interesting thing to note from White is that roughly one-third of all immigrants did not stay here, with many having no intentions of doing so even before they arrived. Some came, could not get established here, or did not like it here, and went back to their country of origin. Others came only to try to make money, then when they thought they had enough, they left.

There is certainly much more to this book than even the topics that I mentioned above. White talks about the stirrings of women’s rights, and follows Frances Willard in that realm much like he followed Howells for the liberal viewpoint. Anti-monopolism was huge then as many people fought a losing battle over the increasing amount of large corporations that were appearing. There is discussion about the currency wars that divided the country along sectional lines, and caused internal divisions within both major political parties. And there is also a theme of the “home” and what that came to mean to Americans in the last half of the 19th century.

Despite my concerns over a few areas such as White’s treatment of Grant, this is a very good book that thoroughly covered much of American life following the Civil War. I have now read all of the books in this series with the exception of the foreign policy volume. While I do not think it is the best book in this group, I think it is one of the better ones, and absolutely worth reading as it focuses on the beginnings of so many different things that are still with us today.

Grade: B+

[Bruce Katz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A masterful work of extraordinary ambition. It looks at this critical period of American history from above, exploring in great detail the larger themes and forces shaping the country. There is much to learn here, but what struck me most -- because of the times we live in, of course -- is how much the post-Civil War decades mirror our own. It is perhaps unsurprising, but no less impressive for that. Consider:

"The inhabitants of the United States often hated each other, and yet they could not avoid each other. Most Americans appealed to ideals of freedom, family, and home, but they often regarded other Americans as a threat to those ideals."

And this, a quote from William Jennings Bryan: "There are two ideas of government. There are those who believe that if you just legislate to make the well-to-do prosperous, their prosperity will leak through on those below. The Democratic idea has been that if you legislate to make the masses prosperous, their prosperity will find its way up and through every class that rests upon it." [Don't read too much into "Democratic" here: the character of the two political parties were quite different from what they are now.]

And finally: "Government was not a business. Citizens were not customers. A republican government could not serve only those citizens who yielded officials the greatest profit. Citizens were due equal treatment, and no group of Americans should be allowed to monopolize public services. Anti-monopolists defined society as a clash of organized classes and interests, and the legitimacy of democratic government -- and thus public compliance with the law -- demanded that officials honor all legitimate interest claims to public resources and not just the claims of those able to pay for them. Public officials had to be subject to democratic will, as expressed through Congress and legislatures, and not available for purchase."

It will be argued, and not unreasonably, that such things as these will be prominent because the author brings a particular perspective (or bias, if you like) to his analysis and what he chooses to highlight and quote. Fair enough. But the fact remains that our country is struggling with precisely the same issues, large and small, that faced those decades: the role of government, corruption, competition between classes, between business owners and workers, racism, immigration, gender, globalism (it wore a different face in the late 19th century, but its forces were being to be powerfully felt), and so much more.

An important and timely read.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t think this is up to series standards. The text and prose is often tedious making somewhat vacuous points. (Really, an obsession with homes was a defining characteristic of the Gilded age? There is no trajectory to show where this came from or how it was different than other periods. There were good chapters on environmental crisis, reconstruction and western development

[Don Roberts · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am reading the Oxford History of the USA. This is the newest book added to the History. It is poorly written, terribly organized, and pedantic. If you want to read a book about the Gilded Age, this is not a good choice. In addition, it is written through current political correctness and is not an objective history. A horrible book, it took me months to get through as it could not hold my interest for more than a few pages at a time. If I hadn't set my goal of reading the entire Oxford History I would relegate this 900 page phone book to the garbage bin.

[W · Rating 2 out of 5]

The preceding volume in the Oxford history of the US series, the classic Civil War account 'Battle Cry of Freedom', was coherently organised, surveyed alternative interpretations, had an engaging narrative, and judiciously balanced its level of detail. This latest volume bounces around its topics, is idiosyncratic in its concerns and point of view, does not grip the reader, and manages to give too little information on some topics, and too much on others.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a recent addition to the Oxford History of the United States. I was familiar with Richard White’s research on the railroads. The book covers the period from Reconstruction (beginning with the death of Lincoln) up until the election of McKinley as President in 1896. The topics of interest to this book are numerous from the immediate end of the Civil War and the subsequent politics up through the crisis/compromise of 1876 (perhaps an even more contentious election than 2016), and through the great recessions/depressions of 1873 and again in 1893. Then there is the conquest and initial settlement of the west, the growth of the railroads with the completion of the transcontinental roads, and the explosion of American industrial growth. Along with this you have the growth of immigration, the reestablishment of racist repression and terror in the Jim Crow period in the South, and the rise of the modern labor movement and massive labor conflicts. Then there was the tariff and the boom and bust economic cycles that were exacerbated by the gold standard and fights over the place of silver in the economy. This only scratches the surface of what a book like this covers.

The wide ranging list of topics should make it clear that the key to a book like this is not whether it covers everything that is important. There is no chance that it possibly could do so. Moreover, the bibliographic essay (which I strongly recommend) shows that for nearly all of the topics that White covers, there is a thriving literature of research results to draw upon. The key to a book like this is how well the author tells a general narrative that ties together the many story lines of interest.

In my opinion, White does a fabulous job. He starts and ends the book with Abraham Lincoln and examines the world of freedom that Lincoln wanted to create (in the Gettysburg address, for example). He then sets out the shadow of the future America that was actually created out the Civil War, with national expansion, industrial growth, a powerful Federal state, and a diverse and contentious population in which race continues as a fundamental issue in US politics today. White adds western expansion to the story, as a second reconstruction in which the US is healed by growth to the status of an integrated continental power. Along the way, the Civil War and its multiple reconstructions influenced national politics and culture in a continuing tension between multiple conflicting forces that defied reconciliation but fostered growth. He follows the shifts in national story telling, remembrance, and ideology as it evolved into more modern forms, many of which continue to resonate today. There is lots of conflict and tension. An odd byproduct of this macro story line and how it was apparent in national politics is that I find myself thinking that national politics could actually be worse than they seem to be today. We could be in 1876 or 1892. That is not good for much solace but it does get one to thinking.

This is a long book, but you do not have to read the whole thing (except for grad students). These are fascinating stories, however, and are frequently misunderstood by people who should know better. So even if one reads parts of it, that will be worthwhile. Read about the failure of Reconstruction. Read about how the US land regime was established in the West. Read about how the cities developed and learned to provide an infrastructure of water, sewers, roads, and electricity for those who lived there in increasing numbers. Read about how the Cattle business actually worked. I could continue but will not. This is a marvelous book but one that is well worth the effort.

You do not get a lot on the military, apart from the Indian Wars, due to the definition of the period. You do not get much on foreign affairs either. That is OK, there is more than enough to keep a reader occupied. The writing is skillful and the material is accessible. The bibliographic essay is excellent and will be helpful for anyone wanting to read more.

[Carmen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this mammoth book because I mistakenly thought, "900+ pages? I should get a good sense of what life was like for different types of people during the Gilded Age and how the many changes affected their lives from a book like that!" I was wrong.

The best parts were when White touched on the widespread racism, the failure of Reconstruction in the South, and his exposure of the false mythology around the American West. You do get a sense of the corruption, racism/sexism/classism of the era, the rise and fall of different sociopolitical movements, but I went into this book knowing all of that. Give me something new. You had 900+ pages to do it. That's why the chapter "Dying for Progress" was fascinating. I had no idea health, statures, and life expectancy rates fell during this time or all of the different ways people sought to screw each other over for profit. (Word of the wise: If you ever travel back to New York in the Gilded Era, don't drink milk).

Basically, if you're looking for an exhaustive account of the political and economic ups and downs in America between 1865-1896, this is the book for you. Old dead white guy history is front and center. Also if you're like me and particularly interested in the period of 1875-1885, you're out of luck. White focused far more on what came before and after.

[Ginny · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Those who don’t learn history are doomed to repeat it.” This thought pervaded my reading of this book. In 2017 (now 2018) we seem to be living in a world vastly similar to the Gilded Age. Too many examples abound. Speeches decrying that 99% are toiling away while 1% reap the rewards. I found out that Donald Trump is not our first supremely unqualified and incompetent president. Trump seems to be the reincarnation of Andrew Johnson.

Such disheartening reading. MLK said that, “the moral arch of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” The Gilded Age disputes that. So many problems, with different names and faces, remain the continual struggle of this country. Fears and phobias that we have too many immigrants, that their religion is despoiling our country (substitute Muslim 2017 for Catholic 1880’s). Republican Congress not calling out President Johnson on racist remarks and anti-Black actions because they wanted to keep power (2017 Republican Congress). Congress getting away with laws that benefit their donor class at the expense of their electorate.

The writing is not easy. With any book that is almost 1,000 pages covering 35 years of American history, I would expect that there could not be one narrative arc. It would have been nice, though, if this writer attended day one of a writing class where the professor teaches that the first job of a writer is to keep the reader interested. To do that, lay out a road map. Put in headings and subheadings. The titles of these chapters do nothing to help you understand the organization of this book. There are subchapters with “I” “II”... Only this author will know what logic he had behind this outline. Also, a good writer can put clauses in sentences that add to the interest of the reading. This writer, who loves clauses, also missed class when use of clauses was explained.

In all, I am very glad I read this book (because of a NYT book review), and I’d just finished reading “Grant” by Chernow and “Personal Memoirs” by US Grant. (Both of which were outstanding reading.) This book is a part of the Oxford Press endeavor to publish a series of books on the entire American history. The series is not yet complete. It also has not been published in historical order. A high percentage of these books have received the Pulitzer and other literary recognition. While I am not on the Pulitzer review committee, I will be shocked if this book gets the prize.

Next up for me, either the 2006 biography of Andrew Carnegie, or the 2017 biography of President McKinley. I like the idea of building upon what I’ve already just explored. Right now I’m leaning toward McKinley. I know next to nothing about him and hope that his presidency might be glorious - and if not that - at least positive. Anything to shake me out of this feeling that we are doomed to repeat ourselves.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

i have been reading this book for at least 30 mins a day for seriously two months. it's VERY long and some of the people white uses to pry open both the narrative and the significance of history are people you have probably heard of already ready -- WCTU, two different henry adamses, tom scott. (for instance if you read his RAILROADED you are not going to learn all that much from the parts of this book about RAILROADs). but some of the other people were really new and revelatory (white is fantastic on intellectual history here).

the project here is arranging post-civil war american history through the lens of the home -- as practical construct, as thing-in-peril, as political and social institution, as dream, as tool for intolerance. white's control and creativity just floored me. there's something to be said for a claim that a big cetaceous single-author book isn't the best vehicle for interpreting an entire country. but richard white can just about get away with it (in part because he's as good a reader as he is a writer). he can be a little tendentious here and there but i tend not to mind because i agree with his tendencies (tendentions?)

if you needed to understand the second half of the 19th century in this country's history in more than 900 but fewer than 1000 pages i have a recommendation for u (it's this book)

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started well. An excellent description of the Reconstruction period, lynching, political power plays, then I got lost
I'm well educated, and have read lots of American history. Okay. Mostly by authors much easier to read: William Manchester, Joseph Ellis, David McCullough, Ron Chernow.

So who is this book, and this series for? Is it me? Or is it White?

What stopped me? I'd come to a name, say a prominent journalist or labor leader, or a footnote. Then, some fifty+ pages later I'd be expected to know who this person is. Or worse, there'd be an ibid footnote, and I'd not be able to find the original footnote it was referring to.

Last straw, after the Civil War, the bloody lynchings, the massacres of 100s of unarmed Indian women and children, the next section about labor conflicts he titles "Years of Violence?" What preceded them, picnics? Whether it was me or the writer, I had had enough. Too hard, too disjointed.

Bowing out.

[Michael Trapani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic addition to the Oxford American history series. First 300ish pages cover Reconstruction with the remaining 550 or so covering the Gilded Age. White revolves the whole era around the concept of “the home”, with Americans of the era struggling to define and protect it. Having just completed it for the second time, I am greatly anticipating Bruce Schulman’s “Reawakened Nation”, which will serve as its direct sequel.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recent events prompted me to puzzle over why so many Americans see Confederate leaders as an important part of our heritage and something deserving of honor. After all, these are folks who rose up in a treasonous war against the United States in the defense of slavery, yet people who call themselves patriotic Americans think we need monuments to these criminals.

In a couple of comparative politics classes in college, we studied how the Germans dealt with their war guilt after WWII. They didn’t put up monuments to Nazi generals. They didn’t insist that the war was fought over states’ rights or some equally absurd European equivalent. No German politician today would argue that statues of Hitler need be protected to preserve German heritage, nor would any thinking person claim that monuments to the perpetrators of the Holocaust are necessary for remembering the history. To the contrary: the Germans prosecuted (incompletely, but still aggressively) Nazi leaders as war criminals. They set up museums and monuments to the victims of the Holocaust, not its perpetrators. They banned fascism. They put up markings on houses that were taken from Jews. They continue to commemorate the event to this day--not through a nostalgic Lost Cause narrative, but through a candid reconciliation with the history. There are handfuls of folks in Germany who want to honor Nazis and point to the Third Reich as a period of German greatness, but these folks are not allowed in polite company. That is how Germany has dealt with its war guilt.

Not so in America. The generals who rose up against the United States and fought to defend the enslavement of an entire race are honored with statues and monuments and the labels on highways and high schools and military bases. Revisionists insist that Lee was not racist, despite the written record and the fact that his invasion of Pennsylvania included a systematic effort to kidnap black people and send them into slavery. Revisionists insist that duty to one’s state is more important than the solemn oath to the Constitution that so many of these generals violated when they turned coat. Revisionists insist that the issue was the tariff--which had been satisfactorily resolved 30 years earlier--or states’ rights, without mentioning that the main “right” the states wished to preserve was the right to own and whip black people.

Just within the last year, protesters marched under rebel flags and swastikas in Charlottesville, Virginia, less than 3 hours from Washington, DC, and murdered an innocent person, and the president of the United States insisted that there were good people on both sides of the event. The president of the United States, who was born and raised in New York, insisted that monuments to Southern Confederate generals are part of “our heritage” and deserve honor. And so, the 150-year tradition of treating the traitors with kid gloves continues, even from--especially from--a president who claims to care about America first. What’s truly amazing is that, despite the adage that ‘victors write the history,’ Americans have allowed Southern apologists to saturate American thought and culture with the Lost Cause narrative that the Confederates were noble, decent people, working to protect their rights and freedom, as if slavery and treason were minor side issues.

This really puzzles me. Why have we put up with this? The Union won the war! The evidence is overwhelming that the war was primarily about slavery! No monument to Confederates is necessary for preserving the history; we have something called books. How is it that a sitting U.S. president can embrace the legacy of literal traitors to the Union, responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of loyal Americans in the defense of the enslavement of black people, yet still maintain an approval rating above zero? What kind of a country wins a just war then spends the next 150 years treating the vanquished foes as noble heroes and treating the enemies’ descendants as delicate snowflakes?

This puzzle, and a friend, inspired me to start reading about the era to try to better understand how the traitors and the racists have been able to co-opt the narrative such that a sitting U.S. president can claim that institutional racism and rebellion against the U.S. is an important part of our heritage worth honoring. I started by reading A Savage War, a fantastic military history of the war that shows, among many other things, that yes, slavery was the reason. Then I came to this book on the Reconstruction period, a period about which I learned very little in school. In fact I knew almost nothing about the aftermath of the Civil War, aside from the bit of western U.S. history I picked up from Mr. Keasey in 8th grade.

My main complaint about the book is that I could have used more detail on Reconstruction. It moves on, giving a lot of attention to the Gilded Age period that followed.

Yet I still learned a lot about Reconstruction (and, as I’ll note below, I found the later period instructive for our current situation as well). The practice of pretending the South did nothing wrong started from the very beginning, when Andrew Johnson took over after Lincoln’s death. Johnson, a Democrat, believed that the real victims of slavery were poor Southern whites. Republicans in Congress such as Thaddeus Stevens wanted to make things right in the South: redistribute land from the deplorable plantation barons to slavery’s actual victims; disenfranchise the traitorous Confederate military (and political) leaders who took up arms against the Union in violation of oaths they’d sworn to the Constitution, and enfranchise the former slaves; protect the freed people from violence, and create a free labor market in which reasonable, mutually beneficial wage and hours contracts could be created. Basically, Johnson was against all of that.

Johnson didn’t want to give land to the former slaves because he didn’t want white farmers to have to compete with black farmers. Johnson granted waiver after waiver to the Confederate leaders who wanted to be able to vote and hold political office. Johnson hamstrung the army such that it was unable to protect freed people and even its own soldiers from the violence of Southern police and mobs. Johnson was one of our worst presidents ever.

Ultimately, the army left behind far too few troops to enforce the Civil War outcome in the South. Those that did stay were subjected to violence as Southernors regained control and the ability to minimize the benefits of the war for the freedpeople. So began the often successful efforts to disenfrachise nonwhites--an effort that continues to this day. A particularly important point is that, as many Republicans foresaw, suffrage for nonwhites gave the south more electoral votes, which they found tremendously useful since they could prevent many blacks from voting.

Grant, a Republican, did a few things to help Reconstruction along, but he was far more aggressive in displacing Native Americans in the west. Hayes was elected in part on promises to not enforce civil rights laws, and that was that.

While today it is the Republicans who reverently honor the racist traitors of the Civil War, in the Reconstruction period it was the Democrats who sought to continue the pattern of oppression and worked to rehabilitate the reputation of the Confederate leaders (to a lesser extent, moderate Republicans helped the Democrats with these efforts as well). At every turn, Democrats resisted efforts to reform the South.

One of the reasons I have so little sympathy for the descendents of the Confederates is that I also have ancestors who were deplorable murderers. In September 1856, a group of Mormons led by John D. Lee, of whom I am a direct descendent, massacred a group of settlers from Arkansas in cold blood and tried to frame Native Americans for the deed. The context of the event was complex indeed, and there are facts that can make the motives for the crime understandable to some extent, but nothing excuses this violence committed by my ancestors (who, by the way, thought they had God and religion on their side). I feel no need to make excuses for them or insist that historians treat the perpetrators with kid gloves to avoid offending me and my living relatives. No; candid history about the crime does not offend me--the crime itself is what offends me. Likewise, I really don’t care that many Southerners are descended from the perpetrators of slavery and the Civil War. I don’t blame the perpetrators’ descendents for the crimes of their forebears, but I also don’t think we must honor racists and criminals just to avoid forcing living people to come to terms with what their ancestors did. And I certainly don’t think that the people of Wyoming or Arizona should be putting up monuments to racists, oddly timed to coincide with the Civil Rights movement or the election of a black president. A mature, healthy, intelligent people handle these kinds of historical incidents by shaming the perpetrators, honoring the victims, and teaching our children that history is necessarily harsh on those who act in deeply immoral ways.

To some extent, White connects Reconstruction to the “greater reconstruction” of western settlement. The U.S. subdued Native Americans--and the subduing was largely done by names familiar to students of the Civil War. Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, and many others made the decisions that, while sometimes done with good intentions, ultimately led to the forced detachment of natives from their lands, with a lot of violence through the process.

White moves on to the larger focus of the book, which is the industrialization and urbanization of America and the coinciding rise of large firms and the antimonopolist movements. This is a debated area among economic historians, of which I am not one, and I often found White’s conclusions odd. However, he seems right that much of the period was characterized by government handouts to big businesses. The most obvious is the land grant system for railroads, which may have served desirable policy goals but was ultimately a large transfer of wealth from taxpayers to a handful of firms. A handout of particular relevance today was the tariff; for example, the steel tariff protected a handful of large steel producers with little noticeable benefit to anyone else, including steel workers, who were often in conflict with management. In 2018 our Lost Cause president is also embracing this Gilded Age policy.

As for the other economic issues, I can agree with White that it’s sometimes hard to see evidence of growing living standards in the late 1800s. I’ll leave the question of whether that’s the correct view to the economic historians; but one can see why many did not feel like things were improving. The economy under Grant in the early years of the Gilded Age (or before it, depending on definitions) was characterized by capital deepening and reallocation of activity--particularly inputs--from agriculture toward mining, manufacturing, and commerce. One interesting item is that when the economy entered downturns and firms cut wages, mass labor strife arose. There are reasons that, in the modern era, we don’t see a lot of wage cuts during recessions. We adjust unemployment.

I think what most struck me about the Gilded Age coverage was the amount of graft in the federal government. During the past year, watching the amount of blatant self dealing and taxpayer-financed luxury being consumed by the U.S. executive branch, I have typically thought of it as hopefully being a temporary pause from better standards. But after reading this book, I am moving toward the view that the 20th century (and first 16 years of the 21st) in America was a freak event. Corruption, while certainly present, was kept at a fairly low level, particularly in the executive branch. U.S. leaders tended to be serious people with interest in governing and policy, who knew they could make plenty of money after leaving office but focused on their jobs, to a reasonable extent, while on the taxpayer payroll. That all changed in 2016--but maybe we’re just back to the Gilded Age. Ultimately, the Constitution does not prevent this sort of thing; we’ve been skating by on norms, and unless Congress wants to act, the U.S. president can do pretty much whatever they want--including aggressively billing taxpayers for services of their private businesses and accepting unlimited bribes through the same, as the current leadership is doing on an almost weekly basis. In 2024, will we be moving back to the 20th century norm in which that kind of blatant corruption was shamed? Or are we returning to an ultimate steady state more like the late 1800s? We’ll see.

A nice thing about the book is that White devotes a lot of discussion to urbanization and how cities dealt with related challenges. Urbanization sparked a massive public health crisis, and White focuses on how some key cities--particularly Chicago--developed modern municipal management and services. I found this discussion enlightening.

The book begins wrapping up with the depression of the mid-1890s. This sharpened key economic debates about the role of monopolists, how society sets wages, monetary policy regimes, and tariffs.

One of White’s closing paragraphs could have been written about 2018: “Bryan’s charge that the Republicans were the party of corporate power and monopoly had an element of truth, but a deeper truth was that the Republicans had long been the party of government intervention. … It was the party of corporate subsidies, of the tariff, and increasingly of an expanded military” (p854).

Page 861 has another good paragraph, on the Lost Cause narrative: “Confederates, for their part, threw out the actual history of the rebellion: ‘they had never fought for slavery, never really engaged in rebellion at all.’ The Lost Cause had been a struggle for independence and was overwhelmed only by the greater numbers and resources of the North. Secession, slavery, and Reconstruction virtually vanished from this account. … In memoirs, speeches at veterans’ encampments, commemorations, and inscriptions on monuments, the myths of the war gradually eroded its history” (862). And there is this: “The guarantee that freedpeople would enjoy rights equal to those of white citizens had proven largely empty” (855).

After “A Savage War” raised my opinion of Grant, this one brought it back down part of the way. He failed as a Reconstruction president--but his war reputation is well deserved.

I really enjoyed this book. I would have liked perhaps another 200 pages on Reconstruction. The book also glosses over the Mormon issue; I could have used 50 pages on that. But overall, a very worthwhile read to which I will often refer back.

[John Boyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another great addition to the Oxford History of the United States! This is a time period that is often neglected in history courses due to the lack of major national conflicts such as war arising. Many readers of history see the advancement of a nation as springing from one major conflict to another but the time periods in between war provide so much pivotal history and the time in American history of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age is full of such rich history. The author provides an overarching theme that carried through out the many chapters in the book and that was the theme of the home. Post Civil War America was looking to move past the horrors of the war and to turn to the domestic arena to build their new lives and the concept of the home as a family's kingdom dominated the time period. The role of the home and family permeated through out the many changing cultural, institutional, and religious spheres of the nation. The home was seen as the purest form of America where the citizenry would be built up, morality would be taught, and progress would be made.

The advancement of the home was most clearly seen in the great western expansion after the Civil War. This was the time period where the nation began to truly stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the motivation behind it was not so much through the gaining of wealth and the building of great cities but through the freedom for citizens to find their own place to build their own home. This advancement also lead to the conquering of the West through the continual push of Native Americans into ever decreasing Reservations. The ever changing landscape and the development of new technologies allowed new farmlands to spring up and the railroad connected the nation in such a way that transnational commerce began to take place.

This time period also saw the development of Social Darwinism and modern sociology through the expanding university system with the expressed desire to change the dynamics of the home and how it plays out in national life. The late 19th Century's concepts remained largely innocent at the time but developed into many of the horrific theories of the concept of life and human value that lead to so many tragedies in the 20th Century. Education also saw many changes from the religious focus of the early part of American History to the secular focus of modern times. The continual push of the church out of secular life saw many of its origins during this time period. Massive changes in technology and industry also changed the landscape through the creation of the industrial city, largely in the Midwest, and the new relationship between capital and labor that would plague the cities in many ways from strikes, labor disputes, poverty, sanitation and the burgeoning division between the wealthy and the poor.

This volume is clear in showing the sins of the nation during this time period but also isn't afraid to praise its accomplishments. It is a very large book that requires a commitment on the reader to stick with it through the end but I believe it would be worth it for the reader because this book will give you a great understanding of the time period and help you learn more about how the nation emerged as a world power in the early 20th Century.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's been a long wait for this installment of The Oxford History of the United States, though the 900 pages of Richard White's magnum opus is a worthy addition to the series. The work merits five stars, though it must be said up front that writing about the gold standard or free-labor debates can be dry and turgid no matter how good the writer. There are also some decisions about areas of focus where I would quibble with White. But he calls forth some uncomfortable truths in assessing the period from Lincoln's death to the turn of the century, that make this a masterpiece.

The Republic for Which It Stands helps to reinforce an ill-formed concept that has been nagging at me for the last few years. In the same way that we talk about "Japan's lost decade" or "ten years of 1950s backsliding," I'm beginning to think that we can look at the entire 19th century as a great leap backward from the heady early-Enlightenment days of Voltaire and Tom Paine. Yep, the entire century. Napoleons, great and small. The U.S. Civil War. The counterrevolutions of 1848. The crushing of the Paris Commune. The dreadful Victorian Era and its global British Empire.

Of course humans were enamored with the Industrial Revolution and the time-saving technologies it brought, but as environmentalists have always warned, this revolution was no tide that rose all boats. It was not good for us. White brings up statistical data to show that mid-19th-century humans were shorter by three or four inches, in poorer health, with shorter average lifespans than their 18th-century counterparts. Yes, there were literary wonders from Poe, Sands, Austen, the Brontes, Dickens, Twain, and new philosophies from Darwin, Marx, and Freud, but think of the dark nature of many of the stories. Think about how Marx and Freud were responses to people that were in piss-poor conditions, both at work and in a stifling, patriarchal home.

White spends some time tearing apart the widespread myth of "home and hearth," but what his book is really about is describing how utterly useless political leaders were in dealing with the Civil War's aftermath, in trying to protect Reconstruction politics, and trying to restrain the evils of great robber barons like Jay Gould. Many people chalk this up to disputes between libertarian (old-style "liberal") Republicans and "bloody-shirt" reformer Republicans, but White suggests it goes deeper. White privilege was entangled in manifest destiny to such an extent, there were no good factions within either the Republican or Democratic parties. Some would say "consider the times" to excuse the racism of social reformers, but I'm with White. One could know in 1850, and know equally well today, that scapegoating the immigrant is wrong. In the post-Civil-War period, scapegoating immigrants was extremely popular. It doesn't make it right. Taking an immoral path due to its popularity remains morally wrong, then, now, and forever.

White does not dwell long on the good intentions and lack of corruption among most Black-led Reconstruction governments of the 1860s-70s (you can turn to Eric Foner's groundbreaking book for that), nor does he spend a lot of time talking about Nathan Bedford Forrest founding the first Ku Klux Klan after the war. But he does show how there was a straight, continuous line between Southern white assaults on state governments (often taken out with the aid of the police), and the later Jim Crow laws and lynching parties at century's end. It's true that the Union was too broke and too exhausted, with too small an army, to consider sending all Southern whites to re-education camps, or to militarily occupying the South for 50 years. But it's also true that Ulysses Grant and all presidents that came after would rather try to make buddy-buddy with Southern whites, and overlook Black voter disenfranchisement, because most Northern whites did not believe African-Americans were ready to vote and own property. They thought the same about Native Americans, which is why many Union generals led the war on the Plains Indian tribes. The only "reformers" in this realm were those that wanted to "save" Indians from genocide by forcibly taking away their culture. What a choice!

White also shows how key labor struggles from the Great Railroad Strike to Homestead to the 1886 Year of Upheaval were the natural result of working people being bled to the point of no longer being able to feed their families. While White does not excuse Haymarket, he puts it in the context of workers being fed up with bosses, police, and state militia. At the same time, he shows how the Knights of Labor won street cred in California by being at the forefront of the anti-Chinese protests. Again, no one in this story comes out looking good.

I wish that White had spent a little more time looking into the personal histories of Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, and several of the rail barons. To those who would say this book already is too long, I'd suggest removing some details on New York City mayoral elections or on Frances Willard of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. It would be better to spend more time on corporate bosses and financiers. One useful point White does make about WCTU and other Christian reform groups is that most of what passed for "Reform" in the 1880s was led by evangelicals and alcohol prohibitionists. The choice was either going with the corrupt Republicans as they spread alcohol and vice throughout the West, or side with temperance Christians and fundamentalists. Or with Democrats nakedly touting white privilege. Whoopee.

As the book slides to a close with Wounded Knee, the financial collapse of 1893, and Ida Wells denouncing daily lynchings, we are relieved to see the century close. It might have ranked as exciting to see William Jennings Bryan trying to reform the Democrats and challenge William McKinley, except McKinley ended up winning the 1896 election, and we all know how silly Bryan ended up looking with his "salvation based on silver certificates" movement. White tries to sound a slightly more upbeat note in his Conclusion, pointing out that muckraker journalists were everywhere, the Progressive movement was about to be born, and that we could say goodbye to the horrid baseline assumptions of the 1800s. Except that he mentions that Theodore Roosevelt's brand of progressivism came with imperial war-mongering attached, while Woodrow Wilson's came with especially virulent racism. And then we realize that we merely exchanged the utter worthlessness of the 1800s for simply a new improved variety of suck.

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a DOOZY! It took me a long time to get through because it was long, dense, and I would read a chapter or two between other books.

Richard White wrote a hell of a book here. I'm a history buff but have always felt like historians neglect the Reconstruction era and so I picked this one up. After reading this, there is a compelling argument to be made that all of America's current political and social problems can be tied directly to how badly Reconstruction was bungled.

White covers every square inch of his history: political, social, economic, unions, race...you name it, it's here. This had a very "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn feel. This was the history not only from the perspective of the ivory towers of power but often from the streets. From the worker in the factory, the mine, the train car. History from the President, but also the tenement toiler.

This should be required reading for anyone who thinks any problems we have are new or unexpected. For anyone who thinks that when bad things happen to the poor, the workers, or minorities that it's a coincidence or just bad luck, PLEASE READ THIS BOOK! Those outcomes are baked into the cake because of this era.

An absolutely fantastic history that I cannot recommend highly enough.

[Logan Grant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the part of the Oxford History of the United States and lives up to the high expectations set by its predecessors. It covers the events occurring between 1865 and 1896, which include post-Civil War Reconstruction, the almost complete conquest of The West, and the rise of capitalism. There have been libraries written about each of these individually, so despite some of the book’s flaws I should be charitable to anyone bold enough to try to encapsulate the myriad tempests of the period into a single volume. Richard White did a commendable job organizing the events into a coherent narrative despite how complex and detached they could be from one another for much of the time. He even managed to identify some themes running between all the disparate affairs covered by the book. Most notably, he articulates the concept of the “Home” and identifies its psychological significance to Americans as they adapted (or refused to adapt) to a changing environment.

In my opinion, the book’s largest flaw is its occasionally distracting piety to the vogues of modern academia. It appears in a variety of ways. Sometimes it is the unwarranted moralizing about the evils of racism, sexism, or other violation of the dignity of a fashionable class of victims. I do not need someone with a PhD to laboriously explain to me that bad things are, in fact, bad. Another example of this piety is the awkwardly forced recognition of fashionable classes of victims where there really isn’t much to say about them. For example, there are numerous points where the role of women in a specific time and place is brought up only to say something to the effect of “they were treated as economically and socially inferior to men- but they were still very important”. It appears to me that White’s motivation in these instances is defensive in nature; that by failing to at least mention women as a group he might be guilty of some transgression. Fear not, faithful readers: whether we’re talking about backroom corruption involving male politicians and businessmen or almost exclusively male labor conflicts: women are extremely important. As fun as it is to roast woke nonsense, if I belabor this criticism any further then I might give the impression that these occurrences, as recurring as they are, present a greater blight upon the book than they truly do. This is a good book, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Reconstruction
This is my first time reading about Reconstruction outside of high school and it’s not a subject I claim even a basic understanding of without reading at least a few more books about it. That said, it appears to me that even though I don’t believe it could have succeeded (by our modern standards) it was a massive failure. Two of the factors contributing to this retrospective failure are 1) that you can’t just destroy something, it must be replaced with something else and 2) there weren’t enough people deeply committed to the sacrifices required to protect and support freed slaves. The surrender and dismantling of the Confederacy left a vacuum that military occupation couldn’t adequately fill. On the other hand, reductions in force of the occupying military created lawless conditions that fostered heinous depredations and terrorism against freed slaves. Southerners were wrong when they gambled that the North wouldn’t pay the price required to prevent their succession, but once the war was over most Northerners were ready to refocus on their own economic progress. I try not to judge the past by modern standards, but Reconstruction has no peers in my mind not only as a failed opportunity, but as a forsaken obligation.

Western Expansion
As with the rest of the book, this is less a single story than a collection of subplots. Indian removal and annihilation, railroad building, and pioneer settlement are the largest aspects of this and are mostly uninspiring. It occurred to me while reading White’s numerous references to the “imperialism” of U.S. policies regarding Native Americans and their land that we need a better word. Imperialism strikes me as a military campaign of conquest that is initiated and sustained by leaders at the top of the political pyramid. For example, James K. Polk initiating war against Mexico to take their lands was textbook imperialism on the part of the United States. The westward expansion that began the moment Europeans landed on the East coast and reached its zenith during the latter half of the 19th century, however, was always more of an organic bottom-up conquest. There were some notable exceptions, but many early-19th century politicians were often trying to stymie the westward migration of settlers, albeit with little enthusiasm and less success. The “imperial” policies of the U.S. government were usually catching up with migration that had been happening for years. Semantics aside, Indian genocide and removal have a compelling claim as the worst chapter in our nation’s history.

Capitalism and the Gilded Age
At some point in my life, I acquired the assumption that the monopolist tycoons of the 19th century were authors and leaders of laissez faire capitalism. It turns out that Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc. were adamantly opposed to the economic liberalism of laissez faire advocates. They saw competition as wasteful and inefficient. They were much closer to centralized planners in that they believed they could bring about an orderly development of resources such as fossil fuels, steel, etc. if only they could control all of it. Eventually monopolists co-opted some of the arguments of laissez faire liberal economic theory to defend against government oversight and regulation of their empires, but this did not make them free market advocates. For their part, economic liberals appear to have detested monopolists and saw their unfair advantage as a result of economic privileges provided by the government.
Labor movements also rose during this period as there was increased estrangement between the owners/managers and their workers. Although all labor disputes are essentially a manifestation of the same conflict, their character and outcome were determined by region and circumstances. The disruption of industries caused by strikes could elicit sympathy or antipathy depending on the role of that industry in the region. For example, a railroad worker’s strike was very poorly received by the local cattlemen who depend on transportation of their livestock for their income. Alternatively, if the striking workers did not disrupt the livelihoods of their fellow citizens, then the local support they received often proved to be the winning edge of the contest.
Another major economic feature of this period was the increasing interaction between government and business that sharply accelerated during the Civil War. The federal government, as well as state and local governments, were expanding their role and responsibilities in society. This necessarily increased the government’s role as a purchaser, consumer, regulator, and investor. The ensuing culture of collaboration and accommodation between government and businesses that arose from this (named the Gilded Age by Mark Twain) seems to me to be inevitable from this standpoint. This overlap of public goals and private benefits was not novel, but its scale and scope expanded tremendously.

Overall, I loved the book for trying to convey all the complexity it could in a single volume. If anyone were interested in learning about any of the three major events in the book, I would probably recommend reading a single book dedicated to each of them rather than The Republic for Which it Stands. Not because it fails in its purpose, but because I think there’s simply too much going on for a single book.

[Brian Pate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Boring and biased. This is definitely the weakest of the contributions to the Oxford series on US history (and this is the fifth one I've read). Ronald White presents a history of the United States from the assassination of Lincoln to the election of McKinley.

I realize objective history is impossible, but White seemed to introduce anachronistic issues, judging the Gilded Age by the collective morality of the 21st century. Specifically, he interpreted history with a modern perspective on conservationism, abortion, gay rights, and the family.

He presented a highly negative portrayal of the Gilded Age. And to be sure, there is much to be critical of! But White found nothing praiseworthy in this time period, nothing of value from which we can learn, no heroes only villains. In White's mind, our better angels died with Lincoln.

[Lauren Hiebner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard White thoroughly covers the time period from the end of the Civil War to the Gilded Age and the 1896 Presidential election. He sees Reconstruction and the Gilded Age as results of Abe Lincoln’s ideology of a republican government of, by, and for the people. To quote White, “Changing the national story from the Civil War to the West amounted to an effort to escape the shadow of the Gilded Age’s banished twin and evade the failure of Reconstruction.” Reconstruction failed because it was undermined by racial prejudices and overwhelmed by terror and violence. The Gilded Age saw new technologies, new methods of production, new ways of organizing work, and a new role for the Federal government in its relationship to the states. Also the emerging conflict between individualism versus community undermined many political, economic, and social advances. The great sectional struggle of the Civil War was replaced by industrial struggles. Finally, White uses the home as a theme and symbol of what was both great in American History and a goal for all peoples. This is a keystone book for the Oxford History series. An excellent read!

[Kris]

900 pages.... oyyyy. Maybe one day...

[Vheissu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is certain to be the "definitive" history of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, at least until the next "definitive" history comes along. White relies heavily if not exclusively on secondary sources, but that in no way diminishes his herculean accomplishment. The book will mostly likely attract the serious student of history, in particular college students looking for a pithy quote or bibliographic references to individuals and events of the era. General readers may quickly become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of White's research. One person in particular to whom I'd like to recommend the book is Dinesh D'Souza

White offers a few metaphors in an attempt to squeeze meaning out of a voluminous history. One that I found profoundly persuasive is that "reconstruction" involved more than the South, but also the West, Midwest, and Northeast. The Civil War so de-formed the Union that any attempt to deal with its aftermath necessarily entailed re-form, hence the title of Richard Hofstadter's great work, The Age of Reform, although White takes Hofstadter to task for adding the idea of "Social Darwinism" to our lexicon. Reconstruction centered on a "universal consensus that the core institution of American society" was the "home," a home that was Protestant, nuclear, and independent. Desultorily White explains how federal officials barely lifted a finger to help Freedmen, who desired such a thing, to achieve it in the South, but ruthlessly used military force in the West to compel American Indians, who didn't desire it, into it. Meanwhile, immigrants in New York City were denied even an opportunity to enjoy such lives through a combination of corporate greed and government connivance.

Ultimately, antebellum reforms never accomplished their intended objectives, mostly because there were simply too many things that needed attention and no two reform leaders or movements could agree on an integrated and coherent approach to all of them. This confusion and conflict would have existed even without wrenching technological advances, venal corruption, and evolving forms of property, labor, and their relationship to each other. The federal government was willing to legislate necessary economic, social, and political reforms, but not to devote the human resources or tax dollars required for their accomplishment. By the end of the century, Congress and the courts battled each other over the proper course of American society while the presidency faded into corruption and irrelevance.

This was an excellent but hardly an easy read. I think my next book will be Victor Sebestyen's new biography of Lenin, which at 500 pages seems like a snap!

[Myles · Rating 5 out of 5]

As I began reading Richard White’s “The Republic for Which it Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896,” I glanced over to a brief review of the book by another Goodreads reader. He thought the book good, but nowhere near James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era,” the volume immediately preceding this one in the Oxford History of the United States, but one that was written many years ago.

On one level I perfectly understand the sentiment. I read that book, too. McPherson’s study was dramatic, covered many perspectives of a single conflict, and was marked with many colourful characters. And what could be more dramatic, or consequential, than a civil war this bloody, this intense over four gruelling years?

But if I thought the Civil War was consequential, White paints Reconstruction as equally consequential. America was not at war with anyone but itself. Vigilante warfare against innocent, poor, illiterate black citizens. Armed cavalry against starved, frightened, aboriginal women, children, the elderly, and the infirm. Riot police against skilled and unskilled industrial workers of dark, dangerous, and polluted factories and mines.

Nothing in this book resembles the “reconstruction” of anything worth keeping. There is nothing nice in Smallville.

Reconstruction of the south began with extreme violence against the black population to prevent them from improving themselves, or voting, or holding public office. Once northern Republicans tired of marshall rule in the south, they permitted white supremacists to return to the leadership roles they held before the conflagration. Southern states wrote new constitutions for themselves that built the Jim Crow south. Then they systematically built rules for preventing blacks from exercising their new rights under the 15th Amendment.

Lynching moved from being a staple of the new West to a staple of the South. Southerners invented rationalizations for their behaviour. They claimed the blacks insulted their women and mocked the rule of law. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Whites hauled blacks out of their homes and businesses to degrade and murder them. Lynchings became community entertainment. The witnesses laughed, took pictures, and in some cases took gruesome souvenirs.

I was hoping for a better illumination of the behaviour of postbellum whites against blacks in White’s volume. Why so many people behaved so badly against people who only a few years before made their businesses thrive, acted as collateral against loans, cleaned their homes, suckled their children, made their meals, and in which whites raped their women who bore their children under conditions of sexual slavery.

Guilt? Fear? Loathing?

Where does such hatred come from?

I’m still not sure.

Corruption which is everywhere is in the settled east. It moves west with the belligerent army commanders President Grant assigns to the Indian lands along with incompetent, venal, and corrupt government officials.

Corruption is more than a minor theme of this book. Hostility to the corrupt political “machines” of Democrat Tammany Hall in New York, to state-wide graft by Republicans, to the enormous subsidies granted the railroads in the form of 100,000,000 acres of land grants; to the fee-based systems of governance across the new and old territories.

Even the famed Sheriff Wyatt Earp and his brothers cashed in. When the Sheriff called with a fine for misbehaviour, he took half, and the state took the other half. This is how America moved west, one hand on the gun and the other on the pocketbook.

More horrifying also was the system whereby jails leased out prisoners to private business for as little as eight cents a day. And in the south, this was a significant way to lock up blacks and return them to slavery sanctioned by the state. Prisoners could be whipped or even killed for misbehaviour.

Western expansion not only was marked with massive government subsidies and an unrelenting war against aboriginal peoples, it was hugely wasteful: west of the 100th meridian the lack of rain made homesteading pointless. The states around the Mississippi grew. The western states languished.

Farming was most often below subsistence, and the vaunted cattle drives of Texas longhorn cattle belied a suicidal business model. An 800-pound steer yielded eight pounds of hamburger meat, after months of herding them across the grasslands, and a couple of years of feeding.

And the self-reliant cowboy of western lore most often was an employee of a large, faceless corporation.

Good history tells us the unvarnished truth.

White then takes his unvarnish brush to capitalism.

Was Andrew Carnegie the self-made multi-millionaire of legend? Well, not quite. Carnegie Steel was one of the big winners of the tariffs Republican administrations levied against foreign steel. Carnegie was also not above trading on insider knowledge with the Pennsylvania Railroad with whom he was allied for so many years.

According to White the railroads were barely if ever profitable. Industrialists used them to offload watered stock to naive investors and award their own construction companies overpriced construction contracts. They even used bankruptcy to invoke the power of the federal government to break union strikes.

Industrialists had little time for organized labour. In the famous Homestead and Pullman strikes, organized labour, though locally quite popular, were squashed with the help of government.

Those millions of European immigrants must have wondered what in the heck they were expecting when they landed in the good ole US of A. Apparently, many only stuck around to earn enough money to return home or support their families abroad. This story about immigration was one among several that forced me to race forward to today for parallels.

Opponents of Trump today criticize the Republicans for wanting to turn off immigration from so-called dangerous elements. This is not so far removed from the electorate of the 1890’s during a terrible depression.

Today’s Republicans want to punish foreign nations with punitive tariffs, again not so different from Republicans of yesteryear.

When we look back to the Republican Party of Lincoln, the party that freed the slaves, how could that party be one and the same as today’s Republican Party that gerrymanders congressional districts away from the voting power of blacks in North Carolina.

Well, actually there are some very real ties to that old party, says White. The Radical Republicans of yesteryear were liberal in the original sense of the word: free speech, free labour, freedom to contract labour, sanctity of property, and self-determination were bedrocks of this party. Today we call this conservatism. They called it liberalism.

The neoliberal ideology some of us criticize today is the natural inheritance of that party.

Some of White’s harshest criticism is saved for the Supreme Court which used the 14th Amendment to spoil legislation aimed to regulate the workplace with a concept called substantive due process.

The US’s weak administrative apparatus could have taken a more progressive track earlier if it were not for a regressive Supreme Court employing outdated liberalist philosophy in the absence of explicit direction in the Constitution. What an ironic turn that is, in hindsight, given the originalism bent of today’s US Supreme Court majority.

And here it is we come to the nub of the problem. The electorate of those days viewed the world Lincoln left behind. Innovation sprung from small workshops and tinkerers. Businesses were small. People were generally able to moderate their income and their working conditions.

When big business came competition came with it. Carnegie, Morgan and their ilk hated competition. It just drove profits into the ground.

Scientific Taylorism was just around the corner, and titans like Carnegie and Frick were fighting wages down to spoil their competitors. They didn’t take adequate measure of the working conditions or the needs of their workmen to manage the workplace.

It wasn’t just that big business made life intolerable. International finance, capital sloshing from Europe to North America and back again, farmers tied to harvests and the growing season. Not to mention the progress in transportation and communications.

And then as now America worries that it has become a plutocracy controlled by the top 1%.

White ties the disparate strands of his story together with the development of ideas and ideology. William Dean Howells is the weathervane, and other intellectuals of the period make an appearance.

White argues that the ideology of the home as a safe haven is what soldiers took home from the battlefields of Virginia. That is what motivated them and that is how they viewed the polity. If you served the home life you were good for the country. If you disrupted the home — and suffragettes fell in this category — you were not good for the home.

Americans even way back then just didn’t trust their own government to improve things, and sometimes it was for good reason. No good public work went untarnished. That doesn’t mean that government has to be small and purposeless. It means Americans should recognize and be more attentive toward collective action. It is as critical to the peace of the people as constitutional freedoms.

The rising temperance movement was part of that and so was the organization of labour. Perhaps that is the source of hatred toward the blacks as well. I don’t know.

One of the inescapable conclusions of a book like this one is that when you give good men a republic they will find ways to subvert its good intentions. Monarchies and autocracies aren’t necessarily functions of history as much as natural creations of the species. That’s a pretty harsh conclusion. Berkeleyan.

I have one word of warning for anybody embarking on this book: keep pen and paper handy for the Adams’s and Addams who pop up in the story. There are a lot of them and they occasionally had me scratching my head: which Adams are we talking about now?

Thanks also to the author for introducing me to the Mugwamps. If there’s one thing I like about American political history it’s all those crazy fringe groups. Copperheads, barnburners, nativists (who don’t seem to like natives much), and now Mugwamps.