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Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920
"Fascinating.... A major work by a leading historian at the top of his game—at once engaging and tightly argued." — The New York Times Book Review “Dazzling cultural history: smart, provocative, and gripping. It is also a book for our times, historically grounded, hopeful, and filled with humane, just, and peaceful possibilities.” — The Washington Post An illuminating and authoritative history of America in the years between the Civil War and World War I, Jackson Lears’s Rebirth of a Nation was named one of the best books of 2009 by The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune , and The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette .
448 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2009
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November 30, 2011
Sprinkled throughout with air balls—self-help business guides as disguised anti-masturbatory tracts?—and rim ricochets and backboard bouncers that do not much take away from the otherwise effortless swishing of one ball after another kissing the netting whilst draining smoothly through the centre. In my opinion, Gilded Age to Great War America encompasses one of the most fascinating and pivotal periods in the history of the Great Republic, and Lears' penetrating, witty and sober rendition of that era—with an eye ever open for the instantiations of American yearning through acts of regeneration and rebirth which he seems so attuned to discovering, uncovering, and understanding—is a minor masterpiece. Yes, he has brought an agenda to this work, but he is upfront about it and builds his case right there upon the page—while those figures he does condemn are done so through their own words. What's more, the brief-but-bountiful bibliographic essay that closes out the book is a mouthwateringly rich field guide to prime-grade reading material.
This is one of those memorable works whose tenor is of a kind that arises continually throughout the weeks after the book itself has been closed and shelved; one whose contents simmer in uncooled, ash-draped coals to flare up at intervals when their extinguishment has been taken for granted. I'd be tempted to upgrade it to a full five stars, if only Lears hadn't shown himself prone to applying the individual and anecdotal to the universal and substantive, a Freudian-Marxist lens to events that seem ill-fitted to such a synthetic magnification. The man can definitely write, however, and his reinterpretation of the near half-century that transpired between the antebellum years of the Civil War and those that closed out the First World War is solid and convincing and blessed with much wisdom, no matter that the latter is proffered from a vantage point of hindsight atop an accumulation of historical scholarship and cultural evolution. What Lears has discovered is a country rent in twain by a brutal and devastating conflict, clearly unable—and perhaps unwilling—to reassemble itself into its prior configuration and seeking a transformation that would provide a transcendence to spirits sorely tried by the cataclysmic upheaval that nearly destroyed the fledgling republic. Enveloped from the eastern shores by the Victorian mores that tightly bound polite society, it yet saw the black underclass making a valiant but hopeless effort to assume the full rights and dignities promised them by the conflict in which they had contributed a weighty share; the last decades of autonomy by the Plains and West Coast Indians, endeavoring to maintain their cultures in the face of unceasing white (and Asian) settler onslaught; and the enduring, tumultuous struggle by the agrarian and urban workers to tame the overmighty engines of a burgeoning capitalism even as males everywhere were tempted to exert a treasured-but-elusive masculinity against elements natural and manufactured whilst their female counterparts sought to secure their places—in homestead and, eventually, in academia and the workplace—through the eradication of such ills as drink and warfare that visited the worst of virile masculinity upon them and their children, wreaking havoc in home and hearth where the woman was oft deemed supreme.
The early years of shaky hope for an emancipated and freedom-testing black minority, the gradual closing of the western frontier with its promise of renewal set against boundless land for the taking and trials for both body and spirit in the taming of its open spaces, play out against legislatures and executives at the state and federal level that were proving themselves dispiritingly ripe for corruption by moneyed interests and occupation by bought men. Graft by government and crafts by human-replacing machines were prominent in the onset of the industrial revolution that powered America into the Gilded Age, the flowering of capitalism that swelled the cities with bodies brought in from the countryside or across the ocean from the Old World. Lears works his way through the personal stories, invariably fascinating—especially that of Nat Deadwood Dick Love, the most famous of the black cowboys and a man born into slavery whose early manhood was spent adventuring upon the Great Plains and contented middle-age traversing the rails as a Pullman porter; Henry Adams, the patrician scion of American presidents who cynically eyed the transformation of the republic into a burgeoning and industrious global power; and Eugene Debs, sympathetically portrayed by an admiring Lears as the tolerant author of a uniquely American socialism that proved pivotal to changing the sensibilities of American citizens in a degree sufficient for future socialist implementations—of individuals who partook of these sprawling, busy years of energetic growth, searching and finding in their travails the yearning for a rebirth, for a transcendence of a world increasingly caged in by civilization and brought under the golden boot, corrupt in its operation or corrupting in its influence, that fueled a wide variety of movements and developments: Evangelical Christianity and its reborn revivifications alongside the romantic, idealistic, and even pragmatic turnings that empowered human realizations; the institutionalizing of Jim Crow laws by white supremacists who desired to abate the violence and lawlessness inflicted upon and against blacks by organizing communities in legal segregation; the coalescing of labor movements to offer resistance to the wage-slavery of Victorian Era capitalism; the expansive spread of a mysterious neurasthenia, an affliction of the nerves that debilitated those suffering, perhaps, from the stress of too much civilization; the rise of capital markets and a patrician class grown rich upon insider trading and illegal speculation who, in several pious individuals, possessed a view of themselves as divinely-ordained amassers of wealth obliged to distribute it to improve the very nation pressed down by their moneyed power; the energy imparted by an ever-increasing amount of immigrant groups—German, Slavic, Irish, Italian, Chinese—and the ability of some to assimilate themselves almost painlessly while others (of which the Asian group stands out like a sore thumb) encouraged discrimination due to the exoticness of their culture and appearance; and, with perhaps the most enduring (and bitter) legacy, the imperialist adventurers who sought a rightful place for a God-favored Anglo-American race within the world, dispensing civilization and culture to those savages whose liberation from other imperial powers had been achieved by force of American arms and whose pliability for and adherence to US trading interests would be ensured by the very same.
Lears particularly excels in his depiction of the tumult and struggle of the working class and its agrarian brethren to secure a better position for its members against the dominant power of capital industry and its governmental arm. The colorful personalities that comprised the core who directed the origins of the populist movement are wonderfully and intelligently fleshed out, as is their participation in the ups and downs of the democratic masses who—rebuffed in their efforts to capture the presidency and bind the power of the barons of monopolistic capitalism to the desires of the workers and farmers whose labor was expended in enriching those selfsame business elites—eventually splintered around the turn of the century, with a sizable portion drawn off to join those whose embrace of Darwinian evolution, protestant promise, and the salvational doctrine of change had seen them labelled as Progressives. This coalition, whose primary foundational purpose was to cleanse the state and federal governmental apparatus of the corruption and graft that had infected it during the long reign of the Gilded Age and one that easily morphed into a general laundering of the soft and hard sins of bourgeois capitalism, would lay the foundation of the modern welfare state that developed out of the New Deal after the terrible trials of the Great Depression. Further buttresses are found by the author in the turn towards managerial capitalism during the same period, modeled upon the techniques pioneered by the (semi-fraudulent in Lears' eyes) Frederick Winslow Taylor and brought to fine precision under the purview of such industrial visionaries as Henry Ford and Herman Hollerith. Such was the breadth of the invigorating Progressive spirit that Theodore Roosevelt—a figure who receives a healthy portion of the disparaging analysis administered by Lears upon those whose actions he finds most indictable—crafted a third party to run on such a platform against his Republican successor, Taft, and the lean and toothy Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson dominates the closing chapter of the book, the admixture of conservatism and progressivism that combined in his character serving as both a goad to striving for utopias of peace and harmony and as a prideful anchor that prevented him from accommodation with the means required to deliver upon his vision; yet another American inflamed and impaired by the desire for a rebirth, for the renewal of a world sullied, torn, and exhausted by the sanguine labors of a murderous half-decade that the white city upon the hill might, in effect and in fact, be realized.
This inner longing was the fuel for the majority of the drives for change that make up The Rebirth of a Nation, the pivotal period in which the Great Republic shed the last vestiges of its post-colonial skin and strode forth boldly to suit itself in the garb of a powerful and lucid modernity. A work impressively—and perhaps overly—ambitious, seeing connexions and patterns in disparate groups, times, historical events and cultural memes that may be too complementary and rigorous to withstand a specialized scrutiny or bear the weight of the authorial implications with which they have been laden, this is nonetheless a considerable accomplishment; whether or not one is convinced by the entirety of Lears presentation, it made for a truly absorbing, enlightening, and contemplative experience. I shall never again view those portentous years without my vision being colored by the shades of this excellent author's reinterpretation.
This is one of those memorable works whose tenor is of a kind that arises continually throughout the weeks after the book itself has been closed and shelved; one whose contents simmer in uncooled, ash-draped coals to flare up at intervals when their extinguishment has been taken for granted. I'd be tempted to upgrade it to a full five stars, if only Lears hadn't shown himself prone to applying the individual and anecdotal to the universal and substantive, a Freudian-Marxist lens to events that seem ill-fitted to such a synthetic magnification. The man can definitely write, however, and his reinterpretation of the near half-century that transpired between the antebellum years of the Civil War and those that closed out the First World War is solid and convincing and blessed with much wisdom, no matter that the latter is proffered from a vantage point of hindsight atop an accumulation of historical scholarship and cultural evolution. What Lears has discovered is a country rent in twain by a brutal and devastating conflict, clearly unable—and perhaps unwilling—to reassemble itself into its prior configuration and seeking a transformation that would provide a transcendence to spirits sorely tried by the cataclysmic upheaval that nearly destroyed the fledgling republic. Enveloped from the eastern shores by the Victorian mores that tightly bound polite society, it yet saw the black underclass making a valiant but hopeless effort to assume the full rights and dignities promised them by the conflict in which they had contributed a weighty share; the last decades of autonomy by the Plains and West Coast Indians, endeavoring to maintain their cultures in the face of unceasing white (and Asian) settler onslaught; and the enduring, tumultuous struggle by the agrarian and urban workers to tame the overmighty engines of a burgeoning capitalism even as males everywhere were tempted to exert a treasured-but-elusive masculinity against elements natural and manufactured whilst their female counterparts sought to secure their places—in homestead and, eventually, in academia and the workplace—through the eradication of such ills as drink and warfare that visited the worst of virile masculinity upon them and their children, wreaking havoc in home and hearth where the woman was oft deemed supreme.
The early years of shaky hope for an emancipated and freedom-testing black minority, the gradual closing of the western frontier with its promise of renewal set against boundless land for the taking and trials for both body and spirit in the taming of its open spaces, play out against legislatures and executives at the state and federal level that were proving themselves dispiritingly ripe for corruption by moneyed interests and occupation by bought men. Graft by government and crafts by human-replacing machines were prominent in the onset of the industrial revolution that powered America into the Gilded Age, the flowering of capitalism that swelled the cities with bodies brought in from the countryside or across the ocean from the Old World. Lears works his way through the personal stories, invariably fascinating—especially that of Nat Deadwood Dick Love, the most famous of the black cowboys and a man born into slavery whose early manhood was spent adventuring upon the Great Plains and contented middle-age traversing the rails as a Pullman porter; Henry Adams, the patrician scion of American presidents who cynically eyed the transformation of the republic into a burgeoning and industrious global power; and Eugene Debs, sympathetically portrayed by an admiring Lears as the tolerant author of a uniquely American socialism that proved pivotal to changing the sensibilities of American citizens in a degree sufficient for future socialist implementations—of individuals who partook of these sprawling, busy years of energetic growth, searching and finding in their travails the yearning for a rebirth, for a transcendence of a world increasingly caged in by civilization and brought under the golden boot, corrupt in its operation or corrupting in its influence, that fueled a wide variety of movements and developments: Evangelical Christianity and its reborn revivifications alongside the romantic, idealistic, and even pragmatic turnings that empowered human realizations; the institutionalizing of Jim Crow laws by white supremacists who desired to abate the violence and lawlessness inflicted upon and against blacks by organizing communities in legal segregation; the coalescing of labor movements to offer resistance to the wage-slavery of Victorian Era capitalism; the expansive spread of a mysterious neurasthenia, an affliction of the nerves that debilitated those suffering, perhaps, from the stress of too much civilization; the rise of capital markets and a patrician class grown rich upon insider trading and illegal speculation who, in several pious individuals, possessed a view of themselves as divinely-ordained amassers of wealth obliged to distribute it to improve the very nation pressed down by their moneyed power; the energy imparted by an ever-increasing amount of immigrant groups—German, Slavic, Irish, Italian, Chinese—and the ability of some to assimilate themselves almost painlessly while others (of which the Asian group stands out like a sore thumb) encouraged discrimination due to the exoticness of their culture and appearance; and, with perhaps the most enduring (and bitter) legacy, the imperialist adventurers who sought a rightful place for a God-favored Anglo-American race within the world, dispensing civilization and culture to those savages whose liberation from other imperial powers had been achieved by force of American arms and whose pliability for and adherence to US trading interests would be ensured by the very same.
Lears particularly excels in his depiction of the tumult and struggle of the working class and its agrarian brethren to secure a better position for its members against the dominant power of capital industry and its governmental arm. The colorful personalities that comprised the core who directed the origins of the populist movement are wonderfully and intelligently fleshed out, as is their participation in the ups and downs of the democratic masses who—rebuffed in their efforts to capture the presidency and bind the power of the barons of monopolistic capitalism to the desires of the workers and farmers whose labor was expended in enriching those selfsame business elites—eventually splintered around the turn of the century, with a sizable portion drawn off to join those whose embrace of Darwinian evolution, protestant promise, and the salvational doctrine of change had seen them labelled as Progressives. This coalition, whose primary foundational purpose was to cleanse the state and federal governmental apparatus of the corruption and graft that had infected it during the long reign of the Gilded Age and one that easily morphed into a general laundering of the soft and hard sins of bourgeois capitalism, would lay the foundation of the modern welfare state that developed out of the New Deal after the terrible trials of the Great Depression. Further buttresses are found by the author in the turn towards managerial capitalism during the same period, modeled upon the techniques pioneered by the (semi-fraudulent in Lears' eyes) Frederick Winslow Taylor and brought to fine precision under the purview of such industrial visionaries as Henry Ford and Herman Hollerith. Such was the breadth of the invigorating Progressive spirit that Theodore Roosevelt—a figure who receives a healthy portion of the disparaging analysis administered by Lears upon those whose actions he finds most indictable—crafted a third party to run on such a platform against his Republican successor, Taft, and the lean and toothy Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson dominates the closing chapter of the book, the admixture of conservatism and progressivism that combined in his character serving as both a goad to striving for utopias of peace and harmony and as a prideful anchor that prevented him from accommodation with the means required to deliver upon his vision; yet another American inflamed and impaired by the desire for a rebirth, for the renewal of a world sullied, torn, and exhausted by the sanguine labors of a murderous half-decade that the white city upon the hill might, in effect and in fact, be realized.
This inner longing was the fuel for the majority of the drives for change that make up The Rebirth of a Nation, the pivotal period in which the Great Republic shed the last vestiges of its post-colonial skin and strode forth boldly to suit itself in the garb of a powerful and lucid modernity. A work impressively—and perhaps overly—ambitious, seeing connexions and patterns in disparate groups, times, historical events and cultural memes that may be too complementary and rigorous to withstand a specialized scrutiny or bear the weight of the authorial implications with which they have been laden, this is nonetheless a considerable accomplishment; whether or not one is convinced by the entirety of Lears presentation, it made for a truly absorbing, enlightening, and contemplative experience. I shall never again view those portentous years without my vision being colored by the shades of this excellent author's reinterpretation.
March 19, 2021
The Compromise of 1877 ended Reconstruction, sealed the alliance between Northern and Southern conservatives, and ratified the shifting emphasis of Northern policy from the political and missionary to the economic and exploitative.
Like every book I have read about this period racism is the foremost topic. Here Jackson Lears ties the rebirth to a regeneration of the Union. This was accomplished by White Northerns and White Southerns joining in the goal of reuniting the country. The Compromise of 1877 succeeded in this by making the country a “white” nation.
Economics becomes a guiding force in life during this period. Although disguised as a desire to civilize barbarians it became little more than a veneer over desires for valuable resources and investment opportunities. “Manifest Destiny and money cohabited comfortably.” Among other examples is the property-ownership by the Americans Indians to the land around the Black Hills. This yielded to the greed of whites after gold was discovered in the region.
Another serious offshoot of the economics was the destruction of our natural resources. Whether the clear-cutting of forests, or the destruction of the buffalo, or the change to one-crop farming, the rationale was a bow to capitalism and commercial productivity.
One result of this bow to economics was the chaotic period of laissez-faire capitalism. This ideal of laissez-faire was compromised by the decades of business dependence on government subsidies. This eventually allowed Populists and Progressives to campaign for increased government supervision of the public interest against the private gain.
It also led to monopolistic corporations that dominated industries. These monopolies bent state legislatures and swallowed local businesses. The old laissez-faire beliefs of competition were now a joke. To make matters worse the Supreme Court ruled that although the Sherman Antitrust Act prohibited price-fixing and cartels, large-scale consolidations were not prohibited. On the other hand it held unions in violation of the Act in that they interfered with interstate commerce.
The author addresses the imperial period at the end of the century. As companies eyed the riches of Hawaii, Central American, and the Philippines, the old belief in the beneficence of white paternalism allowed business interests to enlist the government in aiding their takeover of governments.
This imperial period is linked to consumer consumption as a reciprocal relationship. “If imperial policies helped stimulate consumer demand, consumer demand in turn promoted imperial expansion.” This became especially important as productivity increases due to mechanized farming and assembly-line manufacturing led to overproduction. This was resolved by the increase in demand from foreign markets.
A result of the Civil War was to create a moral lesson — to see the Civil War as a Glorious Crusade. After this war would be seen as a cleansing. The governor of Virginia said soon afterwards “It is a war of purification.” The unspeakable losses were viewed as a religious sacrifice. It was thought that “a vigorous war would tone up the public mind.” This would have major repercussions even up to the present day.
The epitome of this virtue of war was Theodore Roosevelt. He was itching for a fight and the battles in Cuba gave it to him. Here he was able to use his Rough Riders brigade as a route to the Vice-Presidency and, after the assassination of McKinley, the Presidency.
The author takes on the war hysteria of the Wilson era and uses that as an essay about the risks of militarism. Even though the majority of the country was against getting involved in a European War, Wilson and others stirred up support through propaganda, appeals to national honor, and linking military service to manliness.
Race relations reached a nadir at the end of this period. Jim Crow laws were implemented everywhere, The Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson had legitimized “Separate but Equal” as the fact for Black Americans. The author does point out that where Federal Troops were used against striking workers, they were not used to protect the rights of citizens in the South during the Redemption period as White Southerns re-established White Supremacy.
This book was a disappointment. Given a social history of a period from an agrarian society dealing with the devastation and losses after the Civil War to an urban society with automobiles and manned flight, it should have been a more interesting read. In part I think this was a fault with the writing which seemed very uneven. At times I felt that different chapters were written by different people. Frequently the author would reference and explain the works of some writer that did not add anything, or at least much, to the topic.
December 20, 2013
I've never had so much trouble getting through a book—at least one I actually finished—that wasn't assigned to read in school. There are four problems with this book, and they're big ones.
First, the narrative has about as much cohesion and organization as my high school essays did. Yes, there is a theme of "rebirth" or "rejuvenation", but it just isn't strong enough to tie everything together. It could have worked for a selective history of the era instead of a comprehensive one. But because Lears is writing a comprehensive history, he spends a lot of time try to pound everything into that mold (hey, just like my high school essays did!), and it just doesn't hold together.
Second, because of the weak theme, the book meanders all over the place. I don't mind meandering as long as the journey goes past some interesting waypoints (e.g. KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money), but this one doesn't. Lears is at his best when he focuses on an individual and how they were influenced by (and in turn influenced) their environment: Harry Houdini, Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and especially Emily French (pp. 76–79). But these examples are way too few to make the rest of the journey interesting. The narrative just re-treads the same events and people (e.g. William James gets discussed in eleven different places, spanning pages 9 to 330), which would be fine if the book had more thematic variety. But hitting the same historical points from the same thematic perspective gets tiresome quickly.
Third, Lears makes huge generalizations without providing adequate context for them. e.g. from page 233 to which I opened randomly: "In language, photography, architecture, and design, seekers of 'real life' attacked the prettifying gesture, the useless ornament, the banal evasion." This is what makes the book so uninteresting to read, because it's so much "tell" and not nearly enough "show".
Fourth, Lears never questions his own assumption that the social, political, cultural and economic characteristics of the era have strong parallels to the post-Cold War USA. I agree that the two periods have some common characteristics, but diverge in some substantial ways, like service economy vs. industrial economy, or participatory media vs. mass media. If you're going to compare historical eras, even implicitly, to be intellectually honest you've got to acknowledge the contrasts as well.
So, if you're doing research about the era, this book is well sourced and has a great bibliography. If you're just casually interested in it, read something else. I've got a few more books about the American Progressive/Gilded/Victorian I plan to read, and I'll edit this review once I can recommend a better one.
First, the narrative has about as much cohesion and organization as my high school essays did. Yes, there is a theme of "rebirth" or "rejuvenation", but it just isn't strong enough to tie everything together. It could have worked for a selective history of the era instead of a comprehensive one. But because Lears is writing a comprehensive history, he spends a lot of time try to pound everything into that mold (hey, just like my high school essays did!), and it just doesn't hold together.
Second, because of the weak theme, the book meanders all over the place. I don't mind meandering as long as the journey goes past some interesting waypoints (e.g. KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money), but this one doesn't. Lears is at his best when he focuses on an individual and how they were influenced by (and in turn influenced) their environment: Harry Houdini, Eugene Debs, Jane Addams, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and especially Emily French (pp. 76–79). But these examples are way too few to make the rest of the journey interesting. The narrative just re-treads the same events and people (e.g. William James gets discussed in eleven different places, spanning pages 9 to 330), which would be fine if the book had more thematic variety. But hitting the same historical points from the same thematic perspective gets tiresome quickly.
Third, Lears makes huge generalizations without providing adequate context for them. e.g. from page 233 to which I opened randomly: "In language, photography, architecture, and design, seekers of 'real life' attacked the prettifying gesture, the useless ornament, the banal evasion." This is what makes the book so uninteresting to read, because it's so much "tell" and not nearly enough "show".
Fourth, Lears never questions his own assumption that the social, political, cultural and economic characteristics of the era have strong parallels to the post-Cold War USA. I agree that the two periods have some common characteristics, but diverge in some substantial ways, like service economy vs. industrial economy, or participatory media vs. mass media. If you're going to compare historical eras, even implicitly, to be intellectually honest you've got to acknowledge the contrasts as well.
So, if you're doing research about the era, this book is well sourced and has a great bibliography. If you're just casually interested in it, read something else. I've got a few more books about the American Progressive/Gilded/Victorian I plan to read, and I'll edit this review once I can recommend a better one.
September 15, 2012
The cover is a photo of a span bridge under construction, and I suspect that the book designer had read the book and realized that it, like the bridge, had two or three really strong points but was otherwise more or less dangling, disconnected bits and pieces.
I was primed to love this: I needed to read something about the time period anyway; Lears throws in quotes by people I love but historians usually don't touch (e.g., the Henrys Adams and James); he's no averse to actually, like, trying to tell you what happened (rather than banging on about contingency and the deeply individualistic sufferings of short-sighted workers in the Pimlinail factory of Northern Workerville's easter district in the third week of March, 1875) and he's open to the fact that you need to theorize in order to explain what happened. And yet.
The obvious problem that faces a historiographer, particularly if you're seeking a wider audience, is that you probably don't think writing according to chronology is possible. Prohibition needs a narrative different from the narrative that Militarism needs, even if they're connected; so maybe you have thematic chapters? And then, of course, you end up repeating yourself over and over and over... as Lears does.
The obvious problem is that you're probably too intelligent to write a simple Great Man story about what the Presidents were doing during this time period, so you choose a theme: here, the trope of rebirth or regeneration of self/nation/humankind. Great theme. But how exactly do you expound your theme while still giving enough detail? Well, I sure as heck wouldn't want to try. Lears fails at it. He dutifully re-states his theme at the start and end of every chapter, but in between there's very little indication that the facts and stories he tells are connected by this theme, and if so, how, why we should care, and how it all hangs together. If you think the U.S. during this time period is best understood as Regeneration Nation, you need to explain why.
So without chronology or coherent theme to connect the chapters, or the sections, or the paragraphs, the book comes out, I fear, like a big miscellany. It has a *great* bibliographical essay at the end, but that's probably the best thing about the book. Better written than your standard history? On a sentence level, yes. But sentences make paragraphs, which make sections, which make chapters. And having all of them hang together is also a part of good writing.
I was primed to love this: I needed to read something about the time period anyway; Lears throws in quotes by people I love but historians usually don't touch (e.g., the Henrys Adams and James); he's no averse to actually, like, trying to tell you what happened (rather than banging on about contingency and the deeply individualistic sufferings of short-sighted workers in the Pimlinail factory of Northern Workerville's easter district in the third week of March, 1875) and he's open to the fact that you need to theorize in order to explain what happened. And yet.
The obvious problem that faces a historiographer, particularly if you're seeking a wider audience, is that you probably don't think writing according to chronology is possible. Prohibition needs a narrative different from the narrative that Militarism needs, even if they're connected; so maybe you have thematic chapters? And then, of course, you end up repeating yourself over and over and over... as Lears does.
The obvious problem is that you're probably too intelligent to write a simple Great Man story about what the Presidents were doing during this time period, so you choose a theme: here, the trope of rebirth or regeneration of self/nation/humankind. Great theme. But how exactly do you expound your theme while still giving enough detail? Well, I sure as heck wouldn't want to try. Lears fails at it. He dutifully re-states his theme at the start and end of every chapter, but in between there's very little indication that the facts and stories he tells are connected by this theme, and if so, how, why we should care, and how it all hangs together. If you think the U.S. during this time period is best understood as Regeneration Nation, you need to explain why.
So without chronology or coherent theme to connect the chapters, or the sections, or the paragraphs, the book comes out, I fear, like a big miscellany. It has a *great* bibliographical essay at the end, but that's probably the best thing about the book. Better written than your standard history? On a sentence level, yes. But sentences make paragraphs, which make sections, which make chapters. And having all of them hang together is also a part of good writing.
January 2, 2020
This is an intellectual history about the regeneration of American culture from 1877 - 1920. This regeneration had economic, moral, environmental, and political aspects to it. Lears also sees the seeds of modern America in the Civil War. It was in this organized violent nationalism that an American manliness could be proven. He says that this concept was transferred to the genocide against the Native Americans and Imperialistic actions in the world, both with the added characteristic of racism. Both Jim Crow laws in the US and Imperialism abroad depended on racial hierarchy. Lears also looks at economic and social changes that took place with an emphasis on “the redirection of social conflict, the renewal of ruling-class rule, and the incorporation of vitalist impulses” that were essential in making modern America. The foundation for the Cold War was found in “the mythic image of a peace-loving, gun-toting nation - slow to anger but deadly when it rises to the defense of righteousness.” The foundation for modern immigration policy also emerged via “immigration restriction which became another means of maintaining a prosperous, imperial way of life.” Finally, Lears talks about the regeneration of the world attempted through our involvement in WWI. Thus the book comes full circle telling about the regeneration of the US in Civil War and regeneration of the world in WWI. An interesting read.
January 4, 2010
Jackson Lears' Rebirth of a Nation, is a glum reflection on the revivalist, bully-boy, anti-intellectual stream in American culture and psychology that's been flowing strong since the US Civil war, embodied by Teddy Roosevelt on his bad days and by G.W. Bush every day. See: http://www.radioopensource.org/jackson-lears-on-obamas-sorrows-of-empire/
March 28, 2025
Rebirth of a Nation covers a fascinating period in US history from 1877-1920. The first chapter, “The Long Shadow of Appomattox” , begins just after the reconstruction era and reminds us of how deeply wounded the country remained from the brutality of the Civil War. Rather than continuing the fight for emancipation, the country sought reunification through a combination of capitalism and militarism. Southern and Northern military leaders from the civil war could now join forces to continue the westward conquest of Native Americans and embark on empire building with wars around the globe. This brand of apolitical militarism took hold for the supposed purpose of civilizing the inferior races but capitalism and greed were the real motivations. This resurgence of white protestant supremacy and racism, along with unchecked laissez faire capitalism defined the “Gilded Age” and is the subject for this book.
The Gilded age marked a significant rise in racism. The Supreme court reversed the Civil Rights act which allowed for private companies and individuals to discriminate on the basis of race. States began to rewrite their constitutions in order to disenfranchise minority voters. Laborers fought along racial lines, pitting Chinese, Irish, Jews, Slavs, Blacks all against each other and leading to the passage of the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 ( at the time of this act, 20% of California was Chinese). Meanwhile, the “compromise” of 1877 handed the Presidency to Republican Hayes in exchange for federal troops leaving the south and thus paving the way for Jim Crow terrorism to take hold. At the same time, organizations like the YMCA grew nationwide as the epitome of white muscular religious Protestant America.
In the 1880’s and 90’s, market systems and capitalism exploded due to the rise of industrialism and further fueled by a hands off laissez faire government approach. Corruption, insider trading, and pump/dump stock schemes were rampant, particularly involving the railroad stocks which seem to have been the equivalent of AI stocks today. Rockefeller, whose primary business was oil, was wealthier in relative terms than even the richest of today’s modern times. Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc.. were typical of industrial and banking tycoons who made their fortunes through enforcement of poor working conditions, long work days, and frequent wage cuts. Especially vulnerable were unskilled laborers newly arrived from southern Europe and recently freed black slaves. Several major financial crises and market crashes occurred during this time period. The most severe was in 1893 which led to a subsequent depression and deep wage cuts. Literal class warfare ensued as striking workers were suppressed by heavy federal military force intervening on the side of industry. This degree of civil unrest led to the formation of workers rights organizations like the Farmers Alliance and the Knights of Labor which swelled to 700 thousand members in just its first year.
This relatively short book packs a tremendous amount of information presented in a very digestible and readable manner. I learned a great deal about the country’s transition from post civil war devastation to an industrial world imperial power. During this rebirth, the plight of American workers and colonized people around the world highlights the high price for such militaristic and capitalist achievements. As a result, another rebirth was made possible through the eventual rise of the progressive movement. I found it very interesting and encouraging to see how cycles of economic/industrial expansion, financial crises/depression, political upheaval, civil unrest, etc.. seem to lead in a stepwise process of “rebirths” towards an improving American society. It is particularly hopeful to recognize this pattern of history considering our current tumultuous times.
The Gilded age marked a significant rise in racism. The Supreme court reversed the Civil Rights act which allowed for private companies and individuals to discriminate on the basis of race. States began to rewrite their constitutions in order to disenfranchise minority voters. Laborers fought along racial lines, pitting Chinese, Irish, Jews, Slavs, Blacks all against each other and leading to the passage of the Chinese exclusion act of 1882 ( at the time of this act, 20% of California was Chinese). Meanwhile, the “compromise” of 1877 handed the Presidency to Republican Hayes in exchange for federal troops leaving the south and thus paving the way for Jim Crow terrorism to take hold. At the same time, organizations like the YMCA grew nationwide as the epitome of white muscular religious Protestant America.
In the 1880’s and 90’s, market systems and capitalism exploded due to the rise of industrialism and further fueled by a hands off laissez faire government approach. Corruption, insider trading, and pump/dump stock schemes were rampant, particularly involving the railroad stocks which seem to have been the equivalent of AI stocks today. Rockefeller, whose primary business was oil, was wealthier in relative terms than even the richest of today’s modern times. Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt, etc.. were typical of industrial and banking tycoons who made their fortunes through enforcement of poor working conditions, long work days, and frequent wage cuts. Especially vulnerable were unskilled laborers newly arrived from southern Europe and recently freed black slaves. Several major financial crises and market crashes occurred during this time period. The most severe was in 1893 which led to a subsequent depression and deep wage cuts. Literal class warfare ensued as striking workers were suppressed by heavy federal military force intervening on the side of industry. This degree of civil unrest led to the formation of workers rights organizations like the Farmers Alliance and the Knights of Labor which swelled to 700 thousand members in just its first year.
This relatively short book packs a tremendous amount of information presented in a very digestible and readable manner. I learned a great deal about the country’s transition from post civil war devastation to an industrial world imperial power. During this rebirth, the plight of American workers and colonized people around the world highlights the high price for such militaristic and capitalist achievements. As a result, another rebirth was made possible through the eventual rise of the progressive movement. I found it very interesting and encouraging to see how cycles of economic/industrial expansion, financial crises/depression, political upheaval, civil unrest, etc.. seem to lead in a stepwise process of “rebirths” towards an improving American society. It is particularly hopeful to recognize this pattern of history considering our current tumultuous times.
September 29, 2025
Passionately written but an example of an author hating their subject so much that it clouds their judgment. The words "ham fisted" come to mind.
February 3, 2016
Perhaps a bit too limited in focus. Or, better put, not fully integrated.
I feel bad giving this book a rating as low as three stars. Jackson Lears is, for my money, one of the most interesting historical thinkers, nimble and open to ambiguity, fully immersed in the sources but able to rise out of them talk in abstractions: but always abstractions made up of the empirical. Theoretically eclectic (even if the eclecticism comes from the same sources: not contradictory, necessarily, but not usually conjoined.) He’s a graceful writer and this book is a culmination, in many ways, of almost four decades of work.
And yet, it underwhelms.
Lears’s big picture point is that during the 1880s and 1890s, after the horrors of the Civil War could finally be forgotten, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elites from the North and the South, from liberal and conservative traditions, joined together in protecting their status as elites and in forging a thoroughly racist, capitalist culture that emphasized the need for regenerating an American spirit, capturing and unleashing American energy, and forging, through virtuous war, an American empire: one that was both soft and hard, exporting the new consumer capitalism and destroying the bodies of those who would not accept it.
All of which is true and right. Most of which is not particularly novel. I have not seen some of these themes joined in the particular ways Lears does—that is to say, while I have seen references to the continued status of elites despite the social and cultural changes of the time, especially in the South, which underwent rapid modernization, I have not seen the argument applied so broadly to the country, and tied together with the return of racism after the end of Reconstruction. Lears, of course, is careful to note that racism was a prominent part of the American cultural landscape even during Reconstruction, but wants to point out that there were radical opportunities begun then that were foreclosed, not only with Reconstruction’s formal end in 1877—the nominal start of this book, though it really goes back to the beginnings of the Civil War—but after the 1890s, when the white power structure came into its own.
A measure of the book’s exposition of a standard narrative can be found in the bibliographical essay, which cites an inordinate number of classic books from the 1990s, 1980s, and even earlier. The attention to energy and renaissance, the emergence of American imperialism—and its critiques, which Lears explores in depth, both those who were unalterably opposed and used a completely different idiom, such as Mark Twain, and those like Randolph Bourne and William James who also stood against it but were simultaneously seduced by its underlying ideology of force and energy. The books chapters, on the long Shadow of the Civil War, the mysterious power of money, the significance of race, the country and the city, crisis and regeneration, and empire as a way of life often make references to classics in the field as well. These are themes that are well known.
Which is not to say that Lears gives them short-shrift. He struggles valiantly—though often fails—to escape the pull of New York and “the South” as the only regions that matter. He reaches for Chicago, often, and even occasionally San Francisco; the only regionalism, though, is that between North and South. His discussion of race goes beyond black-vs-white—though this is rightly central—and considers Asian racism as well as the shifting hierarchy of European ethnicities. (Latin Americans are mostly viewed as the conquered, this from a lack of attention to the West.) He pays attention to the critics of the main themes he identifies, and those slightly out of touch with the tenor of their times. He gets down into the weeds of populism and the politics of the 1880s and 1890s—which is really the central portion of this book—in two chapters that were intensive enough I skimmed. But he skips over other important developments. There’s no sustained discussion of science, beyond the way parts of it were taken up metaphorically—energy, force—or used to prop up political ideas—biology, anthropology and racism. And then there are other unfortunate exclusions.
Encysted within this general narrative—about America’s regained fascination with war, and its importance to the stability of consumer capitalism as well as an expression of a renewed and vital Anglo-Saxon masculinity—is a second, briefer history. This is told in Chapter Six, Liberation and Limitation, and—oddly enough—the Acknowledgments section. Here, Lears recaps his previous three books—on anti-modernism, advertising, and American views of luck, all from this same period—and mulls on the fate of America. Reading the book straight through, chapter six feels anomalous, as though it is edited into here from a completely different project. To understand it requires understanding some of Lears’ less announced theoretical commitments—and what makes him an interesting writer.
In another life, Lears could have been a preacher. A Protestant preacher. He is fascinated by the role that Protestant religion plays in American life, the way that its meanings, conveyed to individuals, latch up with larger, structural changes in the country. It is an obsession to he returns to again and again, a dog worrying bone. His first book, No State of Grace, told of Americans unsatisfied by the Protestant modernity they had been offered but who still wanted deeper meanings in their lives, and so turned to sources outside American modernity: primitivism, other cultures. Fables of Abundance and Something for Nothing shook out of the narrow, Weberian view of Protestantism and saw that there were additional, more varied Protestant traditions, pietism, for example, that allowed for a more expansive view of modernity. One did not have to either accept instrumental rationality or bail on modernity; one could find enchanted bits, luck and the wonders of commerce. But he still remained leery of modernism as the end point of the Protestant ethic: even when it allowed for enchantment and wonder, this tended toward a therapeutic culture, which was but an impoverished version of the religious world view, instrumental reason applied to the unconscious, stripping it of its sublimity. (Lears is a Freudian, too, which makes his Protestantism interesting.)
Chapter six of the book picks up on this theme, and deals with it again: modernity was both liberation and a limitation for the Protestants. This is a way the book is too limited: he isn’t really interested in the Catholic or Jewish experience during the period. And to this point, he seems to have excluded whole swaths of Protestants as well: for Protestantism was the ground on which grew a number of 19th-century mystical traditions, Theosophy and Christian Science and Mormonism and revivals in magic and the occult. Years does mention these in the chapter as ways that modernity allowed for liberation, a more expansive view of the spiritual universe. But these are brief mentions, giving none of them their cultural due. Indeed, by the end of the chapter, he returns to the view of his first book, that these variations on modern Protestantism were really retreats from modernity, a hope that the old Gods would return. Which ties in with his acknowledgment, where he expresses the belief that American culture may be on the brink of something suffered by Native American cultures of the time he writes about: some were materially successful, having made peace with the USA, but spiritually void and on the verge of cultural collapse because nothing made sense any more.
What Lears refuses to see is that the various forms of wonder that grew out of this period provided a multiplicity of meanings to Americans that continued to grow and give meaning to lives. Yes, some Americans continue to reject modernity, as they did in the time he is chronicling, and some backed into a modern world that was limiting and as bureaucratic as the one they hoped to escape—but others have found paths out of the limits, even though there has been no coalescing of opinion, elite and otherwise, in the last thirty years as tight as it was at the previous fin de siecle. None of these sources of meanings, though, are more the fluff and trivial to Lears: that’s his prophetic leanings. he is Cassandra, warning us all that we have—to swap metaphors—traded our inheritance for a mess of potage, and we don’t even realize it. The problem is, Lears himself feels trapped, not sure how to go forward in world where God is dead, and Freud has been discredited. What is the source of meaning?
If he only had a wider view, he could see that people have been answering that question in creative ways since it was asked during the time he is studying. He just doesn't like the answers.
Finally, a word on the book as a book. The typeface is easily read, and the book put together well. But the pictures! They are ghettoized in a series of plates slated in the beginning of the book, completely decontextualized from the necessary text, and given serially in a way that confounds making sense of them. A very poor choice; better to have skipped them altogether.
I feel bad giving this book a rating as low as three stars. Jackson Lears is, for my money, one of the most interesting historical thinkers, nimble and open to ambiguity, fully immersed in the sources but able to rise out of them talk in abstractions: but always abstractions made up of the empirical. Theoretically eclectic (even if the eclecticism comes from the same sources: not contradictory, necessarily, but not usually conjoined.) He’s a graceful writer and this book is a culmination, in many ways, of almost four decades of work.
And yet, it underwhelms.
Lears’s big picture point is that during the 1880s and 1890s, after the horrors of the Civil War could finally be forgotten, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant elites from the North and the South, from liberal and conservative traditions, joined together in protecting their status as elites and in forging a thoroughly racist, capitalist culture that emphasized the need for regenerating an American spirit, capturing and unleashing American energy, and forging, through virtuous war, an American empire: one that was both soft and hard, exporting the new consumer capitalism and destroying the bodies of those who would not accept it.
All of which is true and right. Most of which is not particularly novel. I have not seen some of these themes joined in the particular ways Lears does—that is to say, while I have seen references to the continued status of elites despite the social and cultural changes of the time, especially in the South, which underwent rapid modernization, I have not seen the argument applied so broadly to the country, and tied together with the return of racism after the end of Reconstruction. Lears, of course, is careful to note that racism was a prominent part of the American cultural landscape even during Reconstruction, but wants to point out that there were radical opportunities begun then that were foreclosed, not only with Reconstruction’s formal end in 1877—the nominal start of this book, though it really goes back to the beginnings of the Civil War—but after the 1890s, when the white power structure came into its own.
A measure of the book’s exposition of a standard narrative can be found in the bibliographical essay, which cites an inordinate number of classic books from the 1990s, 1980s, and even earlier. The attention to energy and renaissance, the emergence of American imperialism—and its critiques, which Lears explores in depth, both those who were unalterably opposed and used a completely different idiom, such as Mark Twain, and those like Randolph Bourne and William James who also stood against it but were simultaneously seduced by its underlying ideology of force and energy. The books chapters, on the long Shadow of the Civil War, the mysterious power of money, the significance of race, the country and the city, crisis and regeneration, and empire as a way of life often make references to classics in the field as well. These are themes that are well known.
Which is not to say that Lears gives them short-shrift. He struggles valiantly—though often fails—to escape the pull of New York and “the South” as the only regions that matter. He reaches for Chicago, often, and even occasionally San Francisco; the only regionalism, though, is that between North and South. His discussion of race goes beyond black-vs-white—though this is rightly central—and considers Asian racism as well as the shifting hierarchy of European ethnicities. (Latin Americans are mostly viewed as the conquered, this from a lack of attention to the West.) He pays attention to the critics of the main themes he identifies, and those slightly out of touch with the tenor of their times. He gets down into the weeds of populism and the politics of the 1880s and 1890s—which is really the central portion of this book—in two chapters that were intensive enough I skimmed. But he skips over other important developments. There’s no sustained discussion of science, beyond the way parts of it were taken up metaphorically—energy, force—or used to prop up political ideas—biology, anthropology and racism. And then there are other unfortunate exclusions.
Encysted within this general narrative—about America’s regained fascination with war, and its importance to the stability of consumer capitalism as well as an expression of a renewed and vital Anglo-Saxon masculinity—is a second, briefer history. This is told in Chapter Six, Liberation and Limitation, and—oddly enough—the Acknowledgments section. Here, Lears recaps his previous three books—on anti-modernism, advertising, and American views of luck, all from this same period—and mulls on the fate of America. Reading the book straight through, chapter six feels anomalous, as though it is edited into here from a completely different project. To understand it requires understanding some of Lears’ less announced theoretical commitments—and what makes him an interesting writer.
In another life, Lears could have been a preacher. A Protestant preacher. He is fascinated by the role that Protestant religion plays in American life, the way that its meanings, conveyed to individuals, latch up with larger, structural changes in the country. It is an obsession to he returns to again and again, a dog worrying bone. His first book, No State of Grace, told of Americans unsatisfied by the Protestant modernity they had been offered but who still wanted deeper meanings in their lives, and so turned to sources outside American modernity: primitivism, other cultures. Fables of Abundance and Something for Nothing shook out of the narrow, Weberian view of Protestantism and saw that there were additional, more varied Protestant traditions, pietism, for example, that allowed for a more expansive view of modernity. One did not have to either accept instrumental rationality or bail on modernity; one could find enchanted bits, luck and the wonders of commerce. But he still remained leery of modernism as the end point of the Protestant ethic: even when it allowed for enchantment and wonder, this tended toward a therapeutic culture, which was but an impoverished version of the religious world view, instrumental reason applied to the unconscious, stripping it of its sublimity. (Lears is a Freudian, too, which makes his Protestantism interesting.)
Chapter six of the book picks up on this theme, and deals with it again: modernity was both liberation and a limitation for the Protestants. This is a way the book is too limited: he isn’t really interested in the Catholic or Jewish experience during the period. And to this point, he seems to have excluded whole swaths of Protestants as well: for Protestantism was the ground on which grew a number of 19th-century mystical traditions, Theosophy and Christian Science and Mormonism and revivals in magic and the occult. Years does mention these in the chapter as ways that modernity allowed for liberation, a more expansive view of the spiritual universe. But these are brief mentions, giving none of them their cultural due. Indeed, by the end of the chapter, he returns to the view of his first book, that these variations on modern Protestantism were really retreats from modernity, a hope that the old Gods would return. Which ties in with his acknowledgment, where he expresses the belief that American culture may be on the brink of something suffered by Native American cultures of the time he writes about: some were materially successful, having made peace with the USA, but spiritually void and on the verge of cultural collapse because nothing made sense any more.
What Lears refuses to see is that the various forms of wonder that grew out of this period provided a multiplicity of meanings to Americans that continued to grow and give meaning to lives. Yes, some Americans continue to reject modernity, as they did in the time he is chronicling, and some backed into a modern world that was limiting and as bureaucratic as the one they hoped to escape—but others have found paths out of the limits, even though there has been no coalescing of opinion, elite and otherwise, in the last thirty years as tight as it was at the previous fin de siecle. None of these sources of meanings, though, are more the fluff and trivial to Lears: that’s his prophetic leanings. he is Cassandra, warning us all that we have—to swap metaphors—traded our inheritance for a mess of potage, and we don’t even realize it. The problem is, Lears himself feels trapped, not sure how to go forward in world where God is dead, and Freud has been discredited. What is the source of meaning?
If he only had a wider view, he could see that people have been answering that question in creative ways since it was asked during the time he is studying. He just doesn't like the answers.
Finally, a word on the book as a book. The typeface is easily read, and the book put together well. But the pictures! They are ghettoized in a series of plates slated in the beginning of the book, completely decontextualized from the necessary text, and given serially in a way that confounds making sense of them. A very poor choice; better to have skipped them altogether.
July 5, 2025
a thematic history of the pivotal shift in American history, from the end of the Civil War to the rise of US global empire building.
in no way a pragmatic accounting of what was built--- this book is about the themes and great political controversies of the era.
each chapter read very much like a unique college lecture. the book wasn't quite what I expected but it was very interesting nonetheless.
in no way a pragmatic accounting of what was built--- this book is about the themes and great political controversies of the era.
each chapter read very much like a unique college lecture. the book wasn't quite what I expected but it was very interesting nonetheless.
February 26, 2025
This book was the first DNF of the year. While I was supposed to read this ENTIRE book for HIST 406, I simply could not finish it. It felt like an ADHD tangent where you cannot finish a story without starting a new one. I am a little too similar to the writing of this book that I could not find it in myself to finish it.
September 14, 2025
enchanting book, makes you want to read every word. convincingly makes the case of its bold opening sentence that, indeed, all history is the history of longing, with so, so many examples. fred taylor probably the most prominent one, his neurotic compulsions still literally run millions of lives. charming, droll, relentless, i had no idea history writing could be so fun. and i love history! so give it a try
October 29, 2012
Yeah, I get it, Mr. Jackson Lears: despite any grace or goodness this great nation of ours has served up on the world, America is a bad, bad place. Its past is littered with sins that can never be fully washed away. Apparently, our nation’s only saving grace is that we allow civil disobedience that takes the form of your latest tome, REBIRTH OF A NATION: THE MAKING OF MODERN AMERICA, 1877-1920, to see the light of day, hoping to brainwash the masses with more of the carbon-copy demagoguery made popular by the Left since the early 1960’s. For a man whom I believe finds himself so progressive, what’s it feel like to repeat talking points from fifty years ago? May I also ask, “How many anti-Communist manifestoes ever see the light of day from inside China?” You might want to take that into consideration the next time you decide to blast the United States for all its failings.
Now that I have that off my chest …
REBIRTH OF A NATION is a disappointment. I picked up the book hoping to be enlightened, but this is history written by academics for academics, a perspective nearly inaccessible to commoners (like me) because I choose to approach the past without the blinders of ideology. Every incident here – even those passed along anecdotally, for Pete’s sake – are dissected and re-assembled with mythic proportions, all demonstrative of America’s worst sentiments: greed, lust, sloth, and any other deadly sins Lears chooses to shackle this great nation with. It’s much less ‘the past’ and far more ‘intellectual pursuit’ – theory (bad theory, I might add) – when an honest, unbiased recitation of the seminal U.S. events with each of these headings (slavery, money, capitalism, industrial growth, etc.) could have been presented and then (and only then) Lears could’ve closed with HIS interpretation of them; instead, nothing gets spared, and I suspect the finished product will only be enjoyed by those who truly hate America. Needless to say, the Huffington Post would be pleased.
The central problem behind Lears’s seemingly central contention – everything decidedly American is inherently evil – is that he loses sight of the fact that because the United States was “the original melting pot” there were many, many of these early biases brought here by the very peoples and cultures assimilated into this new nation. As most of these peoples and cultures flocked to neighborhoods where they could find safety in numbers, some of these bad habits were allowed to flourish because they were just that: “safe in numbers.” But, as H-I-S-T-O-R-Y has shown, many social negatives flourish, flail, and fade on their own – over time – as those folks grew and changed hand-in-hand with one another as well as a greater society at large. Not every social ill requires government intervention. Not every bad habit needs instant eradication. And not every preconception requires a good thrashing.
Was slavery bad? Of course, it was. Was denying women the right to vote flawed? Of course, it was. Are there moments in every nation’s past that we’d like to erase? You betcha, mister. The truth is – and maybe this is news to you from so high up on your pillar of virtue – bad things still happen despite our best intentions.
I’m no historian (and if such highbrow fascinations are a prerequisite then I’m not interested!), but I found it pretty easy to see through Lears’s filters. That doesn’t mean that REBIRTH isn’t a slog. Rather, it is. In fact, it’s a horrible slog! Most of the time, it approaches the point of being untenable, completing shutting down this reader’s desire to know more about what happened during these oft-overlooked decades and, instead, wanting to indulge myself in a long, hot shower. In the author’s narrow view, one moral rings constantly: if it was good for our nation – no matter the cost – then it was bad for our people. Throughout, he badgers both millionaires and commoners alike, though I did find it curious (after some reflection) that he never took a swipe at teachers or unions. He heeps some consistent solid praise on those two groups. Like a spoiled brat, Lears instead pounds his Progressive hammer long after the reader has looked away and lost interest with being blamed for the ills of his forebears. It would appear that with REBIRTH OF A NATION Lears is no longer interested in serving as an educator as he is in ‘teaching a lesson,’ and the lesson here ends up being so much of the same revisionist tripe we’ve heard before.
Now that I have that off my chest …
REBIRTH OF A NATION is a disappointment. I picked up the book hoping to be enlightened, but this is history written by academics for academics, a perspective nearly inaccessible to commoners (like me) because I choose to approach the past without the blinders of ideology. Every incident here – even those passed along anecdotally, for Pete’s sake – are dissected and re-assembled with mythic proportions, all demonstrative of America’s worst sentiments: greed, lust, sloth, and any other deadly sins Lears chooses to shackle this great nation with. It’s much less ‘the past’ and far more ‘intellectual pursuit’ – theory (bad theory, I might add) – when an honest, unbiased recitation of the seminal U.S. events with each of these headings (slavery, money, capitalism, industrial growth, etc.) could have been presented and then (and only then) Lears could’ve closed with HIS interpretation of them; instead, nothing gets spared, and I suspect the finished product will only be enjoyed by those who truly hate America. Needless to say, the Huffington Post would be pleased.
The central problem behind Lears’s seemingly central contention – everything decidedly American is inherently evil – is that he loses sight of the fact that because the United States was “the original melting pot” there were many, many of these early biases brought here by the very peoples and cultures assimilated into this new nation. As most of these peoples and cultures flocked to neighborhoods where they could find safety in numbers, some of these bad habits were allowed to flourish because they were just that: “safe in numbers.” But, as H-I-S-T-O-R-Y has shown, many social negatives flourish, flail, and fade on their own – over time – as those folks grew and changed hand-in-hand with one another as well as a greater society at large. Not every social ill requires government intervention. Not every bad habit needs instant eradication. And not every preconception requires a good thrashing.
Was slavery bad? Of course, it was. Was denying women the right to vote flawed? Of course, it was. Are there moments in every nation’s past that we’d like to erase? You betcha, mister. The truth is – and maybe this is news to you from so high up on your pillar of virtue – bad things still happen despite our best intentions.
I’m no historian (and if such highbrow fascinations are a prerequisite then I’m not interested!), but I found it pretty easy to see through Lears’s filters. That doesn’t mean that REBIRTH isn’t a slog. Rather, it is. In fact, it’s a horrible slog! Most of the time, it approaches the point of being untenable, completing shutting down this reader’s desire to know more about what happened during these oft-overlooked decades and, instead, wanting to indulge myself in a long, hot shower. In the author’s narrow view, one moral rings constantly: if it was good for our nation – no matter the cost – then it was bad for our people. Throughout, he badgers both millionaires and commoners alike, though I did find it curious (after some reflection) that he never took a swipe at teachers or unions. He heeps some consistent solid praise on those two groups. Like a spoiled brat, Lears instead pounds his Progressive hammer long after the reader has looked away and lost interest with being blamed for the ills of his forebears. It would appear that with REBIRTH OF A NATION Lears is no longer interested in serving as an educator as he is in ‘teaching a lesson,’ and the lesson here ends up being so much of the same revisionist tripe we’ve heard before.
January 18, 2023
Lears surveys the Gilded Age through the eyes of a cultural historian. He makes no secret of his biases: the militarist and imperialist Teddy Roosevelt is the villain in this story, while anti-militarist and anti-imperialist voices such as Mark Twain and William James are the heroes.
James is especially close to Lears' heart, and this goes a long way to explaining the book Lears wrote. He shares James' preoccupation with the power and meaning of "religious experience" - and especially James' emphasis on the experiences of white Protestants. If the book has a central theme, it is the shifting meaning of the white Protestant experience during these decades of industrialization and nascent secularization; thus the strongest criticism of the book is that Lears has far too little to say about the experiences of those Americans outside the white Protestant mainstream. However, as an interpreter of that mainstream Protestant culture, he is outstanding - both sensitive and cutting in equal measure.
Lears sees World War I as the culmination of this period in history, and is centrally preoccupied with uncovering the deeper roots of American intervention, as well as honoring voices of dissent. He clearly sympathizes with the Populists and the Anti-Imperialist League, and seeks to partially rehabilitate Woodrow Wilson, who he portrays as a tragic figure.
Not the only book to read on the period, but definitely worthwhile if you like your history passionate and opinionated.
James is especially close to Lears' heart, and this goes a long way to explaining the book Lears wrote. He shares James' preoccupation with the power and meaning of "religious experience" - and especially James' emphasis on the experiences of white Protestants. If the book has a central theme, it is the shifting meaning of the white Protestant experience during these decades of industrialization and nascent secularization; thus the strongest criticism of the book is that Lears has far too little to say about the experiences of those Americans outside the white Protestant mainstream. However, as an interpreter of that mainstream Protestant culture, he is outstanding - both sensitive and cutting in equal measure.
Lears sees World War I as the culmination of this period in history, and is centrally preoccupied with uncovering the deeper roots of American intervention, as well as honoring voices of dissent. He clearly sympathizes with the Populists and the Anti-Imperialist League, and seeks to partially rehabilitate Woodrow Wilson, who he portrays as a tragic figure.
Not the only book to read on the period, but definitely worthwhile if you like your history passionate and opinionated.
April 14, 2020
There are some 5 star sections within the book, specifically and particular section on the rise of imperialism and the initial opponents of what eventually became the dominant ideology in American foreign policy.
January 13, 2020
I thought this book had some good merits; however, I found it to be both repetitive and all over the place at the same time.
February 5, 2025
I was given this as an assigned reading in my advanced history course, and I have so many issues with Lear's writing. To keep it simple, I will point out a few main points:
1. The book itself is not well written. I understand that this is supposed to be a collective history of the US between ~50 years, but Lears just does a horrible job with it. There are many sections of the book in which Lears goes into detail about seemingly useless topics (many of the mini biographies), but cuts all the details out of questionable commentary that he throws around. It would be more logical and simpler for Lears to have split the chapters into more in-detail scopes of American history or just make multiple books on the subject and placing them all in a series. Not only would this make it easier for Lears to throw his confusing and sometimes baseless arguments around, but it would make it easier for newer historians to grasp the historical context that Lears is presenting to the audience.
2. I am not entirely sure what Lears' argument is, but none of my interpretations make sense. Is he trying to argue that Social Christianity and Gospel both built and destroyed the idea of an American Empire? Is he arguing that movements abused Christianity to employ people into congregations of politically-charged moralists? Is he arguing that Christianity is the baseline for all movements within this time period and beyond, including the yearning for social regeneration? He never really sticks to one major thesis, which I find extremely concerning for someone so well-decorated in academic achievement. He's allowed to make whatever argument he wants, but he should formulate one and stick to it without swaying back and forth, especially if he wants his argument to be taken seriously.
3. Lears' random commentary about sex and race are odd and honestly inappropriate. He equates the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man to rape fantasies by white men, which does not seem to make any sense whatsoever. In the time period, it would make sense that white men looked for any reason to commit heinous acts against African Americans, but calling it a hope or fantasy seems forced and questionable (especially with no source immediately attached). He has other comments like this, where he has to defend Jewish populations on numerous occasions after admitting that Jews were making up a disproportionate number of schemes in the early days of American capitalism. He also attempts to hide from the audience that American Indians were committing heinous acts against American prisoners, with rape being included as one of these acts. If Lears wanted to write about history, he should have done it from a perspective that condemns poor actions in general, not just the actions of Americans.
4. My last major point is the overall lack of quantitative evidence that Lears brings to the audience. While there are numerous anecdotes that Lears runs to throughout his lazy attempt to throw 40 years of history together, there are no major numbers that are mentioned throughout the book that satisfy much of his argument. He avoids any attempt to bring numerical evidence into the picture, which is a major concern when you are making broad generalizations about the American populace as a whole. Of course, I will give him the benefit of the doubt as he did mention many quotes from neurologists and presidents of the time, but certainly not enough data was brought to the table to back some of his interesting claims. I would also like to throw in here that he did not use Chicago style for his book, which irritates me as a history major. I love it when authors use Chicago citations so I can check immediately where he or she may have received such knowledge, but Lears does not do so, which is disappointing.
I do not want to bash this book too heavily as I know there is some thought-provoking content in here to be learned. Lears is thoughtful and well-spoken, but it is clear that he is trying to confuse the reader into agreeing with a message that only tells a part of the American story. It is a half-decent book to read if you are interested in some general topics like 19th and 20th century economics and psychology, but Lears skips out on the juicy substance of topics such as demographics, culture clashes between the states and continental Europe, and the technical failures of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson outside their inflated egos.
1. The book itself is not well written. I understand that this is supposed to be a collective history of the US between ~50 years, but Lears just does a horrible job with it. There are many sections of the book in which Lears goes into detail about seemingly useless topics (many of the mini biographies), but cuts all the details out of questionable commentary that he throws around. It would be more logical and simpler for Lears to have split the chapters into more in-detail scopes of American history or just make multiple books on the subject and placing them all in a series. Not only would this make it easier for Lears to throw his confusing and sometimes baseless arguments around, but it would make it easier for newer historians to grasp the historical context that Lears is presenting to the audience.
2. I am not entirely sure what Lears' argument is, but none of my interpretations make sense. Is he trying to argue that Social Christianity and Gospel both built and destroyed the idea of an American Empire? Is he arguing that movements abused Christianity to employ people into congregations of politically-charged moralists? Is he arguing that Christianity is the baseline for all movements within this time period and beyond, including the yearning for social regeneration? He never really sticks to one major thesis, which I find extremely concerning for someone so well-decorated in academic achievement. He's allowed to make whatever argument he wants, but he should formulate one and stick to it without swaying back and forth, especially if he wants his argument to be taken seriously.
3. Lears' random commentary about sex and race are odd and honestly inappropriate. He equates the alleged rape of a white woman by a black man to rape fantasies by white men, which does not seem to make any sense whatsoever. In the time period, it would make sense that white men looked for any reason to commit heinous acts against African Americans, but calling it a hope or fantasy seems forced and questionable (especially with no source immediately attached). He has other comments like this, where he has to defend Jewish populations on numerous occasions after admitting that Jews were making up a disproportionate number of schemes in the early days of American capitalism. He also attempts to hide from the audience that American Indians were committing heinous acts against American prisoners, with rape being included as one of these acts. If Lears wanted to write about history, he should have done it from a perspective that condemns poor actions in general, not just the actions of Americans.
4. My last major point is the overall lack of quantitative evidence that Lears brings to the audience. While there are numerous anecdotes that Lears runs to throughout his lazy attempt to throw 40 years of history together, there are no major numbers that are mentioned throughout the book that satisfy much of his argument. He avoids any attempt to bring numerical evidence into the picture, which is a major concern when you are making broad generalizations about the American populace as a whole. Of course, I will give him the benefit of the doubt as he did mention many quotes from neurologists and presidents of the time, but certainly not enough data was brought to the table to back some of his interesting claims. I would also like to throw in here that he did not use Chicago style for his book, which irritates me as a history major. I love it when authors use Chicago citations so I can check immediately where he or she may have received such knowledge, but Lears does not do so, which is disappointing.
I do not want to bash this book too heavily as I know there is some thought-provoking content in here to be learned. Lears is thoughtful and well-spoken, but it is clear that he is trying to confuse the reader into agreeing with a message that only tells a part of the American story. It is a half-decent book to read if you are interested in some general topics like 19th and 20th century economics and psychology, but Lears skips out on the juicy substance of topics such as demographics, culture clashes between the states and continental Europe, and the technical failures of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson outside their inflated egos.
October 31, 2017
In Rebirth of a Nation Jackson Lears argues that the period between the end of the American Civil War and the First World War saw a ‘regeneration’ of American society from the ground up. Everywhere during this time, he notes, the symptoms of a nation rebuilding could be seen. Although different groups had very different ideas about how the nation should be reconstructed after such a devastating and divisive war- from the agrarian populists to the urban progressives to the utopian socialists-, they all nonetheless shared the idea that out of the ashes of the old nation could come something better. This, he argues, explains the spirit of reform that marked this era.
Lears examines two separate levels of American society at this time. Firstly, he explores the social- the inner thoughts and workings of the American people and their relationship to the rhetoric of rebirth that was so prevalent in society at this time. He looks at the American citizen’s relationship with the lingering memory of the Civil War, looking specifically at the ways in which fantasies of regeneration through war inspired a militaristic culture. Secondly he explores the broader context in which the traditions of the late nineteenth century converged with American Protestantism to create the environment in which reform could occur. Lears seeks to explain the public shifts, changes and reforms that took place in this period by placing them in the context of the private and the social, crucially linking them all back to the protestant reformation.
Essentially Lears seems to argue that Civil War nostalgia combined with the tenets of American Protestantism and the ‘re-birth’ associated with both drove American society between 1877 and 1920, guiding such cultural phenomena as temperance, body-building, US imperialism, frontier mythology, the taming of capital, restriction of immigration and ultimately US involvement in WWI. The era was saturated with the language of personal and social reform as the whole country sought regeneration and rebirth on multiple levels, from the political to the personal- which reformers often linked. This created a milieu of intervention in which public health and welfare became hot topics for conversation and the government grew in size and strength. However, the reform impulse took many different forms and manifestations, as different groups sought to ‘rebuild’ the nation in their own image- this meant for some a welfare-drive, Debs-style socialist state, for others a liberal, business driven nation, and for others a segregated, white-supremacist society.
Lears argues that while the ‘taming’ of capitalism and the ending of the laissez-faire system was the most obvious and oft-discussed result of this age of rejuvenative thought, the myriad of other consequences cannot be untied from the same ‘social rebirth’ movement that spurred on progressivism and its antecedents. Utopian visions were rooted in moral absolutism and often enforced strict moral codes and moral and social engineering as a part of their progressive vision- i.e. temperance, the control of sexuality, the control of women, eugenics etc.
Lears examines two separate levels of American society at this time. Firstly, he explores the social- the inner thoughts and workings of the American people and their relationship to the rhetoric of rebirth that was so prevalent in society at this time. He looks at the American citizen’s relationship with the lingering memory of the Civil War, looking specifically at the ways in which fantasies of regeneration through war inspired a militaristic culture. Secondly he explores the broader context in which the traditions of the late nineteenth century converged with American Protestantism to create the environment in which reform could occur. Lears seeks to explain the public shifts, changes and reforms that took place in this period by placing them in the context of the private and the social, crucially linking them all back to the protestant reformation.
Essentially Lears seems to argue that Civil War nostalgia combined with the tenets of American Protestantism and the ‘re-birth’ associated with both drove American society between 1877 and 1920, guiding such cultural phenomena as temperance, body-building, US imperialism, frontier mythology, the taming of capital, restriction of immigration and ultimately US involvement in WWI. The era was saturated with the language of personal and social reform as the whole country sought regeneration and rebirth on multiple levels, from the political to the personal- which reformers often linked. This created a milieu of intervention in which public health and welfare became hot topics for conversation and the government grew in size and strength. However, the reform impulse took many different forms and manifestations, as different groups sought to ‘rebuild’ the nation in their own image- this meant for some a welfare-drive, Debs-style socialist state, for others a liberal, business driven nation, and for others a segregated, white-supremacist society.
Lears argues that while the ‘taming’ of capitalism and the ending of the laissez-faire system was the most obvious and oft-discussed result of this age of rejuvenative thought, the myriad of other consequences cannot be untied from the same ‘social rebirth’ movement that spurred on progressivism and its antecedents. Utopian visions were rooted in moral absolutism and often enforced strict moral codes and moral and social engineering as a part of their progressive vision- i.e. temperance, the control of sexuality, the control of women, eugenics etc.
September 5, 2024
After doing my now-annual read-through of Battle Cry, I decided to continue through the Oxford series. I finished Richard White’s entry a couple weeks ago and then, well, the way is unclear. The next entry (chronologically) hasn’t come out yet and has been delayed multiple times; think of it as the US history version of GRRM. So I wanted to find something to fill in that gap era, roughly between the Gilded Age and the Depression. I saw some talk about this book here and decided to try it out. I am very glad I did!
Now, in terms of filling that gap, I’m not sure I would recommend this book. It’s nowhere near the comprehensive overarching narrative history that you get in the Oxford series. It never claims to be that, the book isn’t even 400 pages long. It does still give you a reasonable overview of many key events, and I cannot overstate how enjoyable the book is when viewed on its own. I read the whole thing in a few days. Lears is thoughtful, incisive, and oftentimes funny. He is willing to state things more directly than most other historians, which I imagine contributes to the relatively low overall rating the book has on this site. As just one example, when discussing Theodore Roosevelt’s revision of the Monroe Doctrine, Lears says “Generations of politicians, historians, and journalists have embraced the preposterous assumption that imperialists like Roosevelt were somehow reluctant to exercise power”, and then calls out David McCullough’s appearance in a PBS documentary in the 1990s as an example. What a delight. I do wish he listed citations within the text like lots of denser history books do, just because I’m like that, but to act like he is just saying things without any evidence is laughable. So my final statement: do not read this as a substitute for the (hopefully) forthcoming Oxford entry on the period, but absolutely *do* read this. It was interesting and enjoyable and meaningful and getting all those at once is difficult.
Now, in terms of filling that gap, I’m not sure I would recommend this book. It’s nowhere near the comprehensive overarching narrative history that you get in the Oxford series. It never claims to be that, the book isn’t even 400 pages long. It does still give you a reasonable overview of many key events, and I cannot overstate how enjoyable the book is when viewed on its own. I read the whole thing in a few days. Lears is thoughtful, incisive, and oftentimes funny. He is willing to state things more directly than most other historians, which I imagine contributes to the relatively low overall rating the book has on this site. As just one example, when discussing Theodore Roosevelt’s revision of the Monroe Doctrine, Lears says “Generations of politicians, historians, and journalists have embraced the preposterous assumption that imperialists like Roosevelt were somehow reluctant to exercise power”, and then calls out David McCullough’s appearance in a PBS documentary in the 1990s as an example. What a delight. I do wish he listed citations within the text like lots of denser history books do, just because I’m like that, but to act like he is just saying things without any evidence is laughable. So my final statement: do not read this as a substitute for the (hopefully) forthcoming Oxford entry on the period, but absolutely *do* read this. It was interesting and enjoyable and meaningful and getting all those at once is difficult.
June 28, 2018
Jackson Lears provides an unconventional, but persuasive, framework for understanding the Gilded and Progressive eras. Competing visions of national regeneration defined the times. Lears focuses on two major themes — militaristic regeneration versus nonviolent moral and social renewal — but he also probes the people's mix of fascination with and fear of the market economy, new forms of religiosity and secularism, and the desire of many Americans, from Southern white landowners to scientific racists, to exclude people of color. His explanation of the fight over the gold standard is gripping, and that's no small feat, making economics the stuff of high drama (let alone comprehensible to the layman!). There is no historiography in the book; this is a synthesis for the public, so the emphasis is on repackaging recent research with analytic themes. I'm not knocking Lears. He does a great job of combining the latest findings with his interpretation, and he loads the book with primary source excerpts. Those excerpts will make it very useful for students and members of the public unfamiliar with this material. I might have enjoyed some discussion of historiography. I think the general public could be interested in interpretive debates between historians, if the major claims of each author are conveyed clearly and without condescension. What Lears provides is substantial, though. And it's a fast read!
September 2, 2022
Though occassionally tedious, this was actually a pretty fun read, but you have to understand, the author's voice is front and center. (You also have to understand that this period can often simply be somewhat tedious - there's no way around discussing tarif regulation, railroad regulation, currency regulation, labor laws...really just lots of regulation) This is not an objective, straight-forward history of the period. Of course there is a lot of that kind of thing, but Lears' speculations and musings are everywhere, and honestly, that's kind've the fun part. Lears is a highly respected historian with decades under his belt studying this stuff, so why not let him loose to speculate and muse on the origins, reaches, and impacts of cultural and social trends of the period? If you're looking for a fleshed out Encyclopia entry on the time period this really isn't it, though you will certainly become much more familiar with the time period. However, if you're fine with getting your history with a hefty dose of a highly regarded historian's musings on the trends and events of the period then you might really enjoy this book. Think of this more as a frequently interesting, somewhat disjointed and meandering lecture on the period from an erudite and often rather amusing professor and your expectations will more in line for what awaits you.
April 9, 2016
Writing in 1920 about the end of the Gilded Age, the noted historian Frederick Turner argued the age of free competition for unpossessed resources had ended. In his view, there had been an ongoing conflict between capitalists and democratic pioneers since the early colonial days. The frontier line, steadily expanding westward for decades and the origin of American democracy, had disappeared throwing the country into turmoil. The industrial revolution caused additional change. Mining had brought new production records in coal and gold. Railroad passengers and freight had trebled and then doubled again. Immigration exploded to “supply the mobile army of cheap labor for the centers of industrial life.” Billions of dollars in wealth concentrated in urban areas and, more specifically, in the few “masters of industry” who believed themselves pioneers doggedly carrying on with the work of taming and developing the nation’s natural resources. Turner’s argument was grounded in the tough, independent American who was reborn by the wilderness of the frontier. Jackson Lears springs forward, soundly rejecting Frederic Turner’s frontier interpretation as myth created for mass-market entertainment for white audiences, with a sweeping reinterpretation focused on American religion and culture as it grappled with the growing power of capitalism and the struggle of workers. In arguing against Turner’s frontier, Lears builds his own cultural thesis based on the mythology of American dreams of abundance and limitless potential empowered by belief of redeeming Anglo-Saxon supremacy.
The path to redemption was paved with racism and militarism. Inherent in the cultural and economic struggle to redemption was the nation’s rejection of the Civil War’s potential for racial equality. Americans, especially white men, faced a crisis of change in nearly every corner of society. In response, Lears contends that the very meaning of the Civil War had to change from a struggle to end slavery to a montage of personal heroism where white men demonstrated their valor. Instead, the war became a starting point, perhaps even the motivation, to legitimize racism as a path to white North-South reconciliation. The result was a modernized regenerative American creed thoroughly molded in Anglo-Saxon tradition and “endlessly adaptable to the purposes of power.” Jim Crow grew rampant in the south. The US Supreme Court legalized the way to invalidate Indian treaties in the west leading to a government policy of deliberate extermination. Scientific racism simultaneously reinforced white myths of superiority and destroyed the potential for racial equality.
Lears argues there was a profound yearning for rebirth expressed through the evangelical religion of the Y.M.C.A and the widespread belief in a potential for endless personal growth. Both were rooted in liberal and evangelical Protestantism. Both were rooted in racial superiority and its justification of strength through domination. Lears explains that the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethic was the dominant paradigm in American politics. From the heights wealth and power to the depths of tramps seeking work to survive, this paradigm needed the glory myth of the Civil War as its catalyst. The unification of religious belief, racist undertones, and a propensity to militarism drove change in society. Lears uses both racism and militarism in numerous vignettes as motivation. One example is George Armstrong Custer’s minor mission to protect mining and railroad interests in the Dakotas that became the myth of his valiant but doomed last stand against reviled Native Americans and portrayed him as a gallant soldier and hero of the “whole Saxon race.” Another is the unionized workers who cast their actions as heroic confrontations against the evil and immorality of management and “draconian labor policies.” Even the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by businessmen and the U.S. Marines was cast as a blow for freedom instead of a racist coup.
Lears notes that there were economic reasons for expansionist policies that lead to the coup in Hawaii but asserts that the underlying reason was Protestant redemption. This argues against a pure economic or profit motive. Instead, it conjoins capitalism and progress under religious motives and Anglo-Saxon arrogance. He quotes Henry Cabot Lodge saying that without new markets the country would face wage declines and great industrial disturbances. The true motivation, however, is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. Behind the economic calculations, Lear says, was the underlying superiority racism and desire for redemption through militarism. Roosevelt argued for freedom and democracy but only Anglo-Saxons had the ability to self-govern. Roosevelt championed the strenuous life tapping into a growing cultural value of public demonstrations of physical courage. The desire for a better struggle for existence was “the heart of all life.” Putting action to his words, Roosevelt transformed himself into a war hero in a well-publicized but tactically insignificant charge up San Juan Hill effectively merging the Civil War mythology of heroic struggle and Christian militarism. American foreign policy took a decidedly imperialistic turn using the justification of Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny.
Jackson Lears makes a persuasive argument challenging Frederick Turner’s assertion that American culture and democracy was formed by an expanding frontier. It does create a romantic image of American independence and strength, but it is a self-limiting argument constrained by the end of westward expansion. Migrating the theory from a geographical frontier to a capitalist frontier stretches its credibility even if it allowed wealthy and powerful industrialists to assume the romantic mantle of the frontier. The sweeping reinterpretation focusing on the power of religion to affect culture creates no less of a romantic motivation for a society grappling with change. It is a compelling and well-supported argument. One has to wonder if a deeper look into the root causes underlying Turner’s frontier thesis would reveal Protestant theology.
The path to redemption was paved with racism and militarism. Inherent in the cultural and economic struggle to redemption was the nation’s rejection of the Civil War’s potential for racial equality. Americans, especially white men, faced a crisis of change in nearly every corner of society. In response, Lears contends that the very meaning of the Civil War had to change from a struggle to end slavery to a montage of personal heroism where white men demonstrated their valor. Instead, the war became a starting point, perhaps even the motivation, to legitimize racism as a path to white North-South reconciliation. The result was a modernized regenerative American creed thoroughly molded in Anglo-Saxon tradition and “endlessly adaptable to the purposes of power.” Jim Crow grew rampant in the south. The US Supreme Court legalized the way to invalidate Indian treaties in the west leading to a government policy of deliberate extermination. Scientific racism simultaneously reinforced white myths of superiority and destroyed the potential for racial equality.
Lears argues there was a profound yearning for rebirth expressed through the evangelical religion of the Y.M.C.A and the widespread belief in a potential for endless personal growth. Both were rooted in liberal and evangelical Protestantism. Both were rooted in racial superiority and its justification of strength through domination. Lears explains that the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ethic was the dominant paradigm in American politics. From the heights wealth and power to the depths of tramps seeking work to survive, this paradigm needed the glory myth of the Civil War as its catalyst. The unification of religious belief, racist undertones, and a propensity to militarism drove change in society. Lears uses both racism and militarism in numerous vignettes as motivation. One example is George Armstrong Custer’s minor mission to protect mining and railroad interests in the Dakotas that became the myth of his valiant but doomed last stand against reviled Native Americans and portrayed him as a gallant soldier and hero of the “whole Saxon race.” Another is the unionized workers who cast their actions as heroic confrontations against the evil and immorality of management and “draconian labor policies.” Even the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by businessmen and the U.S. Marines was cast as a blow for freedom instead of a racist coup.
Lears notes that there were economic reasons for expansionist policies that lead to the coup in Hawaii but asserts that the underlying reason was Protestant redemption. This argues against a pure economic or profit motive. Instead, it conjoins capitalism and progress under religious motives and Anglo-Saxon arrogance. He quotes Henry Cabot Lodge saying that without new markets the country would face wage declines and great industrial disturbances. The true motivation, however, is attributed to Theodore Roosevelt. Behind the economic calculations, Lear says, was the underlying superiority racism and desire for redemption through militarism. Roosevelt argued for freedom and democracy but only Anglo-Saxons had the ability to self-govern. Roosevelt championed the strenuous life tapping into a growing cultural value of public demonstrations of physical courage. The desire for a better struggle for existence was “the heart of all life.” Putting action to his words, Roosevelt transformed himself into a war hero in a well-publicized but tactically insignificant charge up San Juan Hill effectively merging the Civil War mythology of heroic struggle and Christian militarism. American foreign policy took a decidedly imperialistic turn using the justification of Anglo-Saxon manifest destiny.
Jackson Lears makes a persuasive argument challenging Frederick Turner’s assertion that American culture and democracy was formed by an expanding frontier. It does create a romantic image of American independence and strength, but it is a self-limiting argument constrained by the end of westward expansion. Migrating the theory from a geographical frontier to a capitalist frontier stretches its credibility even if it allowed wealthy and powerful industrialists to assume the romantic mantle of the frontier. The sweeping reinterpretation focusing on the power of religion to affect culture creates no less of a romantic motivation for a society grappling with change. It is a compelling and well-supported argument. One has to wonder if a deeper look into the root causes underlying Turner’s frontier thesis would reveal Protestant theology.
January 11, 2022
This was a thought-provoking read, and I am glad of the insights it provided about American brand imperialism; there are certainly insights for today. I also appreciate the in-depth look at the economies of the period that contributed to and resulted from the pursuit of regeneration. However, while the author skillfully demonstrates that Americans pursued regeneration/revitalization/renewal/rebirth and tried many avenues to find it, he provides no articulated definition of what he understands that process to be even as he explores how the various pursuits deviated and strayed from the original goal. Additionally, there's much discussion in the text of the relation of American Protestantism and the Social Gospel, among other religious subjects, to the overall theme, but the bibliographical note is seemingly lacking on sources on the same, even though the bibliographical note is fifteen pages long and is appreciably rich on sources about empire, race, gender, biography, literature, economics, and politics.
Overall, I'm glad to add it to my library as it has added to my historical knowledge of the era.
Overall, I'm glad to add it to my library as it has added to my historical knowledge of the era.
March 3, 2019
Jackson Lears’ Rebirth of a Nation revisits a period – 1877 to 1920 – that Lears wrote about with verve and insight in an earlier book, No Place of Grace: Anti-Modernism and the Transformation of American Culture. Its great theme is the coming of modern times. Lears shows us what this meant to the culture – in the arts, in consciousness, religion, and how Americans defined themselves. It’s an impressive book that makes sense of an era crowded with big personalities and technological change.
Lears new book is about the stew of yearning and politics that went into the Progressive era. The Populist agenda of the farmers was largely overshadowed by “managerial” solutions, he says. The economy would be managed by the East Coast, by Wall Street. While Main Street would see some improvements, it never won the control of credit and railroads that it sought.
Of the two books, readers will gain a better understanding from No Place of Grace of how this transformative period made the United States we know.
Lears new book is about the stew of yearning and politics that went into the Progressive era. The Populist agenda of the farmers was largely overshadowed by “managerial” solutions, he says. The economy would be managed by the East Coast, by Wall Street. While Main Street would see some improvements, it never won the control of credit and railroads that it sought.
Of the two books, readers will gain a better understanding from No Place of Grace of how this transformative period made the United States we know.
April 22, 2025
When people talk about revisionism, they usually mean one of two very different things.
The first, and ongoing use of revision is to revise our view of history based on new data. New viewpoints may also be seen as revisionism.
The other, the second and more popular use of the word is to change history by ignoring facts or viewing history through a glass that ignores the historical reality. "Presentism" is the most common form of the viewpoint that ignores the historical reality.
This book pretends to be the "new viewpoints" and is actually the second form of revisionism.
It's full of mistakes about the historical facts, and views the historical period through a view point that ignores the realities of the era. In fact, I think Jackson Lears invents some of the garbage that appears in this book.
Not recommended.
The first, and ongoing use of revision is to revise our view of history based on new data. New viewpoints may also be seen as revisionism.
The other, the second and more popular use of the word is to change history by ignoring facts or viewing history through a glass that ignores the historical reality. "Presentism" is the most common form of the viewpoint that ignores the historical reality.
This book pretends to be the "new viewpoints" and is actually the second form of revisionism.
It's full of mistakes about the historical facts, and views the historical period through a view point that ignores the realities of the era. In fact, I think Jackson Lears invents some of the garbage that appears in this book.
Not recommended.
September 5, 2020
Presenting a survey of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States, Lears focuses on central themes - from religious rebirth and fervor to imperialism - as ways of examining how this roughly fifty-year period of American history set the stage for the Global Superpower the United States became in the aftermath of the Second World War. Scrutinizing decades of contradictory domestic politics ranging from "soft" versus "hard" money to the United States' imperial ambitions cloaked behind a 'civilizing' zeal to make the world "safe for democracy," Lears presents a cogent and insightful examination of an often all-too-overlooked period of American history and its shaping of the United States to this day.
December 29, 2021
(3.5 stars) This work had an interesting premise, of how America redefined itself as a nation after the Civil War. Between Reconstruction, the end of that, The Gilded Age, the various labor issues and up to World War I, this work sought to explain the actions and players that did much to shape modern America. It holds that racial and socio-economic discrimination did much to impact in the 19th-20th century.
Yet, the work does seem to jump around a fair amount. It covers the major players/actions, but then tries to quickly tie it to the common populace. The work tries to catch everything, but it is the art of the impossible to do so in one volume. Worth a read, but probably not one to dwell on/revisit.
Yet, the work does seem to jump around a fair amount. It covers the major players/actions, but then tries to quickly tie it to the common populace. The work tries to catch everything, but it is the art of the impossible to do so in one volume. Worth a read, but probably not one to dwell on/revisit.
October 23, 2017
This professor from the Rutgers University History Department has written a compelling survey of what made the years 1877 to 1920 distinctive in America's past. His thesis is that these years following the Civil War and Reconstruction were distinctive for a strong desire among Americans to find a regenerative impulse in their lives. This spirit took humane forms that helped Americans, such as the movements for antitrust regulation and central control of the monetary system. Yet it also took on darker forms, such as the willingness to ostracize and segregate African-Americans or the desire to pursue warfare as a way to cleanse an "overcivilized" population.
May 3, 2019
There is so much history and deep analysis in this compact book. The legislative and political lessons learned between these years resonate in shocking fits and sobering parallels to today's world. Reading this book gives you a healthy perspective of just how complex and nuanced our political system is—how it can be corrupted, transformed, work really well, or not at all and the fascinating cycles that tend to repeat themselves. Lears has a gift for digging in and providing sunlight to the patrimonial 'gaslighting' of 19th century leaders, thinkers, and capitalists of the ruling class.
March 4, 2018
A pacifist, socialist, hippie writes a book, and it's exceptional. Not what I would have guessed, but Lears provides a very enlightening look at a neglected period and ties together many aspects of American life under the theme of regeneration. I don't share many of his foundational beliefs or agree with many of his conclusions, but his structure and thoughtfulness make this a memorable and useful history.
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