The Lakotas and the Black Hills

Jeffrey Ostler. The Lakotas and the Black Hills: The Struggle for Sacred Ground. New York: Penguin Books, 2010.

This short, readable popular history is a good introduction to the history of the dispossession of the Lakota peoples' claims to the Black Hills, and subsequent legal battles to have those claims recognized, compensated, and addressed. It also touches on issues of the legitimacy of Indian claims to first sovereignty in general, as the Lakota people were arguably relative to the Black Hills, who replaced earlier Indian people from whom they might have acquired some of their mythologies and spiritual beliefs connected to the landscape and specific places.

One of the arguments used to justify the dispossession of the Lakota was to rely ohn reports which downplayed their presence in, and longtime residency in, the Black Hills--Ostler makes a compelling argument that such claims, when not completely dishonest, relied on a misunderstanding of the ways in which the Lakota used the resources of the Black Hills and focused their cultural and spiritual practices on specific places in the landscape.

A better understanding of the Lakota people are their claims to the Black Hills should help readers develop a broader appreciation for how impossibly rigorous standards of legitimacy and historical veracity have been wielded by State governments and Federal authorities to undermine Indian sovereignty and access to judicial recourse. The second half of this book, which follows the long, still-unfinished legal battle for recognition of Lakota claims, is also a reminder that Indian history didn't end with the end of the Treaty period, or with the confinement to reservations at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Romance of Reunion

Nina Silber. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

The story of Reconstruction, the Redemption of white rule, and the eventual "reunion" of the Northern and Southern whites a few decades after the end of the Civil War--at the expense of African-Americans, who were pointedly "written out" of the national narrative--is frequently told from the Southern point of view. It was the defeated former Confederacy which had to reckon with the specter of defeat, the unsettling of old racial caste norms, the newly enfranchised African-American vote, the attitude of victorious Northerners, and the prospect of having to redefine their place in the very country they fought four years to dismember.

Silber looks at the story from the perspective of the white North. She finds that in many ways, this is actually a gender history--Northerners, as she points out, had their own anxieties and fears to work out, and they did so partly by casting the South as a feminine contrast to their own presumed masculine mastery and strength.

At the same time, white Northern attitudes towards freedmen would shift along with anxieties about working class agitation and concerns about increased levels of immigration--the notion that Southern whites might understand "the Negro problem" best allowed Northerners both to cease worrying about the consequences of abandoning Reconstruction and it promises, and to allow Southern whites a subsidiary but respectable role in enforcing social and political harmony in "their" section of the country.

Ben Tillman & The Reconstruction of White Supremacy

Stephen Kantrowitz. Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000.

Ben Tillman was a key political figure in South Carolina from late Reconstruction through the early Progressive Era. Beginning as a terrorist opposing Reconstruction rule and Black political participation, he parlayed his early prominence as an unapologetic leader of the "Red Shirt" militias into a long career as a Democratic Party operative, Governor, and finally several terms in the US Senate. Well known as one of the leading figures in the campaign to restore white supremacy and create the Jim Crow state, "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman proudly and shrewdly deployed his propensity for violence both rhetorical and physical to back him his national image as a crude but determined representative of the common (white) man.

Kantrowitz approaches Tillman's career from two vantage points. On the one hand, he considers the ways in which Tillman and his supporters conceptualized "whiteness". Tillman applied both racial and gendered facets to his conception of what made a truly "White" man. Tillman based his notion of whiteness on a Jeffersonian producerist idealization of the independent white farmer.

This played into the second facet of Tillman's life--his frequent rhetorical flirtations with radicalism and agrarian populism. Many observers at the time assumed Tillman was a Populist and even a Progressive (early in his career he promoted agricultural reform and education), and many historians and biographers since have followed suit. But Kantrowitz points out that Tillman himself was actually a substantial landowner (and the son of a planter) rather than one of the simple farmers he claimed to champion. More importantly, his commitment to agrarian reform and Progressive measures was severely limited by his primary commitment--to white supremhacy as he understood it. Maintaining the latter meant often sacrificing the best interests of many common whites, for fear of empowering or allowing a political opening to African-Americans.

In the end, Tillman's brand of white supremacy could only be maintained at a heavy cost--a willingness to engage in violence against both Blacks and Whites who failed to adhere to rigidly defined social roles would be coupled with a serious undermining of democratic participation, and economic stagnation. Tillman died feeling pessimistic that his system could survive. He was right, but it would take several more decades and much more suffering before his toxic legacy of a politically and legally enforced formal caste system would be undone.

Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877

David O. Stowell. Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

The Great Strike of 1877 has long served as an important "periodizational" function, providing a dramatic break between the Reconstruction era (which formally ended that same year with the deal which put Hayes in the White House) and the Gilded Age. Given the degree to which the Gilded Age was marked by frequent labor strife and intermittent major strikes, the neatness of this temporal demarcation is almost too good to be true.

But while the utility of the Great Strike as a milestone event is nearly impossible to argue with, David Stowell argues that traditional interpretations of the Great Strike as a spontaneous outbreak of working-class unity should not be accepted as settled fact. He argues that while traditional interpretations have approached the strike from a labor history perspective, the widespread public support generated by the original railroad strike wasn't necessarily a matter of working class solidarity.

He compares three Erie Canal cities--Buffalo Syracuse, and Albany--which experienced different levels of intensity, violence, and public support. By comparing reports and arrest records with maps, he regards the Great Strike from the perspective of urban history and also spatial history, he persuasively argues a counter-narrative in which most participants in the Great Strike were local residents and business owners who wanted to resist the intrusion of railroads into urban spaces and streets. Railroads were a constant menace to safety and quality of life, and they had on often detrimental effect on local economic activity as well.

Stowell acknowledges that his argument is somewhat speculative, but then again he points out that the traditional labor history interpretations relied largely on statements, speeches, and rhetorical assumptions.

The Incorporation of America

Alan Trachtenberg. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982, 2007.

Trachtenberg's study straddles the fields of history and culture, coming from a point of view which attempted to analyze the development of the United States in ways which transcended rigid interpretive frameworks. In the Preface to this 25th Anniversary edition he notes that when the book was first published in 1982, "American Studies" was then a more "transgressive enterprise." (xiv) Even now, the book has a breadth of reach which sets it apart from many more traditional historical monographs.

"Incorporation" is most commonly used in the context of creating a business, and while Trachtenberg is using the term in a much broader sense--both in the sense of creating a unity out of parts as well as the sense of creating a body or a "person"--he deliberately plays on that common understanding by saying that America was "incorporated" because in many ways the cultural transformation the nation and its people went through at that time were driven by the aggressive growth of industrial capitalism and attendant phenomena, including mechanization, urban growth, the rapid opening of western land to cash-crop based agricultural, the spread of railroads, the development of finance capital, and so on.

Trachtenberg depicts the people of the United States grappling with complex, sometimes logically conflicting, notions of identity and purpose. Their society still spoke the language of stable Republican virtue and the moral economy of self-sufficient producers, but they were being driven to participate in an aggressive capitalist cycle of dynamic, creative destructive, and towards becoming consumers of mass-produced goods which were advertised in ways which turned products into abstractions tied to personal desires and detached from the act of manufacture.

This was a country where politics became a matter of fierce partisan rivalry masking a complete detachment of the Federal government from substantive action in the national economy--as in so many other areas of American society, politicians found themselves being "incorporated" into an America where the big economic questions increasingly were addressed only from the outside, by dissident groups such as the Populists who struggled to articulate new grievances in language befitting the new order.

Reconstruction as a Process of Statist Freedom

Gregory P. Downs. After Apomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

It has been several decades since historians began the long process of redeeming the memory of Reconstruction from the dustbin the era had been consigned to by the Dunning school and subsequent scholars. It is no longer unthinkable, perhaps not even all that controversial, to argue that the era was marked by a noble, if ultimately limited and in many ways failed, experiment in expanding freedom. Reconstruction is no longer seen as a period of corruption and misrule imposed upon a defeated white Southern population, but rather as the first Civil Rights movement in American history.

But according to Downs, an important aspect of Reconstruction has been left out of the picture--the role of the military. While most historians of the period recognize there was such as thing as "military reconstruction" that understanding largely focuses on the role of the army in specific policing actions,and as the byproduct of a period in which the Federal government struggled to create new civic institutions and to populate political positions in the former Confederacy. Downs argues that the army played a much more central and proactive role in the period. This was made possible by an important fact that most histories get wrong--the Civil War did not end at Appomattox; in fact, it did not for several years after Lee surrendered to Grant. The lack of open warfare between formal armies, and the vanquishing of the Confederacy as a functioning polity meant the end of large-scale combat, but a formal, legal state of war existed until 1868 in most former CSA states, and until 1871 in a few others, finishing in Georgia. Until States were readmitted into the Union--under conditions imposed on them--and their elected representatives were seated in Congress, Republicans would insist that a state of war existed.

This didn't merely give the army an increased role in the enforcement of civil law--it some cases it meant that the army created law, and acted as the final arbiter of legal and judicial authority. In essence, the fact of martial law created the space for Republicans--both Radical and moderates, and even many conservatives--to rally together and take steps which in peacetime would have been impossible. The conditions of war allowed Republicans intent on stamping out white Southern insurgency and defending African-American (and white Republican) lives to go beyond the limits of the Constitution. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were passed under circumstances which would not have passed Constitutional muster in normal times.

But Republicans and many in the army argued that as Reconstruction was not a normal time, they had both the opportunity and the obligation to go beyond the legal powers of the Constitution in order to save their conception of how it should work. In the Introduction, Downs writes "Constitutional protections that we still take for granted--due process, equal protection, birthright citizenship, the vote--were by-products of martial law." (2) The state of war gave Republicans the extra-legal space in which to expand the definition of citizenship and rights beyond all Antebellum norms. The presence of the army gave force to these experiments--it also gave physical, tangible support to freedmen's collective aspirations and bold experiments in building civic institutions and political organizations in the shadows of their former masters and the white society which had kept them enslaved prior to the arrival of liberating soldiers.

The experience of relying on the army to defend and support efforts and asserting political and economic freedom in the face of stiff and violent resistance meant that African-Americans in the South came to understand the role of government as being a defender of freedom and the basis of its implementation. This statist conception of liberty was completely at odds with the libertarian notion of the importance of freedom from government which was the ideological basis of the Democratic Party which would lead the assault on the political, social, and economic gains created during Reconstruction.

Downs admits that there are hard questions to consider in this story. The gains of Reconstruction were made through a temporary cession of full Constitutional supremacy. At the same time, recognizing that those gains were significant (if often tenuous and ephemeral) forces the reader to consider the degree to which rights are the product not just of abstract law, but of the plain fact of force and the willingness to use it.

Ruin Nation

Megan Kate Nelson. Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2012.

Nelson defines a ruin as "a material whole that has violently broken into parts; enough of these parts must remain in situ, however, that the observer can recognize what they used to be." (2)  She argues that her book is "the first book to consider the evocative power of wartime ruination as an imagined state, an act of destruction, and a process of change."  (9)  This book is intended as a cultural history of war drawing from a variety of disciplines and interpretive tracks.

Each of the four chapters considers a different type of "ruin"--cities; individual family homes; forests and trees; and wounded soldiers who suffered the loss of one or more limb, often to battlefield surgeons. The first two were the sort of "ruins" one normally thinks of, while the latter two were living things and therefore it's an interesting conceptual assertion by Nelson. In all four cases, however, she notes a commonality--the particular American experience of ruination would prove ephemeral, as Americans preferred rebuilding to preserving when possible--cities and houses were rebuilt, forests regrew, and disable veterans would eventually die.

The messages that ruins presented, and the narratives created to give them meaning, varied by example as well as time and place, but in general Nelson tries to argue that the very concept of ruination created a physical, visible landscape which Americans grappled with, assigning narrative meaning to lone chimneys (represented destroyed houses) and empty sleeves (representing war amputees) as well as to efforts to repair damage and restore or recreate this new world.

It's not entirely clear from her text that "ruination" is a concept which would have made sense at the time, not in the over-arching sense she gives it. Nor does her book lead from the four different topics to a more cohesive vision at the end. All the same, this is an interesting way of trying to recreate the way in which the war was experienced at the time--a messier reality than the pristine lawns of modern Civil War battlefield sites would suggest.

This Republic of Suffering

Drew Gilpin Faust. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008.

The American Civil War did a lot of things. One of the most profound outcomes of the war was the sheer number of lives it claimed. War, at its most basic level, is about killing people. For Americans who lived through the Civil War, the experience of death on an industrial scale challenged antebellum notions of mortality and humanity. Aside from the political and moral issues at stake, the Civil War unleashed a quantitative and qualitative overload of carnage both corporal and psychological on American society.

Faust organizes her book thematically, moving from "Dying" through "Killing", "Burying", "Naming" and so on. She notes in the beginning that Americans of the mid-nineteenth century were more accustomed to the first-hand experience of death than most contemporary Americans are--most people died in their homes then, and the antebellum notion of the "good death" predominated. A "good death" meant that the person dying was prepared for his or her demise, at peace with their fate and ready for a (Christian) afterlife. Also, their death was in the home, witnessed by family who were there for comfort--a comfort for both the dying and the bereaved, whom needed confirmation that their loved one had met his or her end in a manner befitting both gender norms and religious strictures.

The experience of sending thousands of young men off to die in strange places far from the people who knew them and loved them was a massive shock, then, and one which forced society to alter old expectations to accommodate new realities. Patriotism was often substituted for faith as the guiding principle at work, because while there was no way to confirm that a dying soldier had been ready to meet his maker, the death of a soldier could, by default, be said to have been sanctified by service to country.

The ways in which the scale and industrial savagery of the war challenged older assumptions and mores was matched by the ways in which it created entirely new problems and relations. The question of what to do with the dead, how to memorialize them, and how to compensate the families they left behind had massive consequences, ranging from an expanded role for the national state (particularly regarding pensions for Union veterans), to the landscaping of national cemeteries.

It is often said that the Civil War was the first modern war, a break from those that came before and a precursor to those which would follow. Faust has found a new way in which to make that old argument.

Disunion!

Elizabeth R. Varon. Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

Elizabeth Veron argues "that 'disunion' was once the most provocative and potent word in the political vocabulary of Americans." (1) She goes to great pains to distinguish between 'disunion' and 'secession'; while the latter is a political, if not constitutional, process, the former was a broader and somewhat more abstract concept as well as a rhetorical device. It contained a wide spectrum of meanings and purposes: prophecy, threat, accusation, process, and program. From the founding of the Republic through the final secession crisis which led to the Civil War, the notion of 'disunion' haunted the polity and served as both warning and weapon for actors on all sides of the most fundamental conflicts of the early Republic.

'Disunion' was such a potent rhetorical trope because it spoke to existential anxieties about the fundamental nature of the Republic and the Constitutional order--"it suggested that the beloved Union might be contingent". (5)  The Constitution itself instituionalized hard-won, carefully calculated compromises on several foundational issues, most notably that of slavery--an issue so delicate the document declined to name it.

Therefore, threats of disunion could cow opponents, even as accusations of the same could paint the target as a threat to stability and, of course, union. Early discourse on disunion centered on issues of sectional conflict or partisan discord; early examples include the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in response to the perceived threat of Federalist dominance, as well as the Hartford Convention. However, it was slavery which most often provoked charges and accusations of disunion. Both Southern Fire-Eaters and Northern Abolitionists (particularly Garrisonian immediatists) resorted to the language of disunion, as both sides sought to portray the Union as being fundamentally unsound.

However, it was slavery which most often evoked the language of disunion, and as sectional tensions rose the language of disunion became a fixed feature of the associated discord. Varon quotes Edward Ayres regarding the dichotomy between those "fundamentalists" who believed slavery was the "cause" of the Civil War, and those "revisionists" who believed that slavery was an aspect of antebellum society intertwined with other issues, and that the war was the product of an avoidable political crisis. Ayres wanted to find a way out of this bind, and Varon proposes her book as an answer to his plea.

The degree to which she succeeds is a mixed bag. She is at her best when arguing most strenuously that 'disunion' was a perennial and deeply coded facet of American political culture for decades. Yet, despite her (correct, in my reading) insistence that disunion and secession are separate issues, as the Civil War approaches much of the book ends up as yet another recounting of the secession crisis. Perhaps this is unavoidable, and in fairness the narrative ends with a provocative argument that the language of disunion fed into the secession crisis because it spoke to so many aspects of white Southern anxiety--not just the constitutional issues of slavery but also racial anxieties, "class and gender disorder, foreign intervention, moral decline, and economic decay." (338) At it's strongest, Varon's book adds complexity, nuance, and historical continuity to the otherwise sometime jarring accounts of the success of secession in 1860 and the war which followed.

The Ruling Race

James Oakes. The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.

James Oakes argues that in order to understand slavery it is necessary not only to understand the experience of the enslaved, but also of those who enslaved them. The slaveholding class he describes differs from the commonly accepted image of a conservative, stable gentry ruling over plantations—he notes that while most slaves lived on large plantations, most slaveowners were not plantation masters—they were small or middling owners of far fewer slaves. They were also far more attuned to the dynamic capitalist market and the aggressive, confident democratic American political culture than the conservative plantation aristocracy which dominate the periphery along the Chesapeake, Carolina Lowcountry, Gulf coast, southern Louisiana, and near Natchez in the Mississippi Delta.

This slaveholding class was overlooked in most historical studies because they were less visible—the most conservative, larger slaveholders held larger numbers of slaves and they also dominated the production of intellectual arguments in favor of slavery. What Oakes demonstrates is that many of the “positive good” arguments which historians have studied were produced by this conservative minority, who were also opposed to the continued expansion and development of the Southern economy and the South as a geographic entity.

This is a work of social history, so in making his argument, Oakes relied heavily on census data for a representative sampling (10 counties) of slaveholders. He supplemented this information with excerpts from letters, journals, and periodicals—although he cautions in the Introduction that these must be read with caution and a healthy dose of skepticism; he argues that historians had accepted these slaveholder accounts much less critically than they had the testimonies and narratives of former slaves.

Oakes is wrote this book at a time when Eugene Genovese’s Roll Jordan Roll held a dominating place in the historiography of the slaveholding class. Oakes is respectful but not deferential to Genovese, whom he credits with delineating much of the current understanding of the planter class, including the concept of “paternalism.” But Oakes disagrees with the nature of how the slaveholding class fulfilled and lived up to the paternal ideal. Oakes’ slaveholders are much more dynamic, much more market-oriented, and far less traditionalist than the grand old paternalists Genovese described (and increasingly empathized with as his politics shifted to the right).

Oakes is telling a story which is very much of the 19th century; it would be interesting, however, to compare his picture of upwardly-mobile middling slaveholders to more Northern-focused studies of the Market Revolution and the development of Jacksonian democracy.

In many ways, this book is both a good example of the strengths of social history when applied to an appropriate subject—in this case, a social and economic class with easily defined parameters—as well as an illustration of the ultimate shortcomings of the field which led to its demise as the cutting edge of the profession. The book reveals a lot but leaves the reader wondering how the world Oakes describes fits into the larger picture of American culture at large.

Furthermore, while this is a study of slaveholders, the complete absence of non-slaveholding white Southerners leaves Oakes without an “other” to contrast with. I would have appreciated a better sense of how typical—or not—the slaveholding class was compared to the broader Southern society.

Out of the House of Bondage

Thavolia Glymph. Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Glymph argues that the myth of Southern womanhood—the ideal of the gentle, loving, kind-hearted lady of plantation myth—bore little relation to the reality. White mistresses were stern, often brutal, taskmasters who directed the work of black female domestic servants in plantation households. The idealized portrait was a product of the mythologized, idealized Old South; it’s purpose was both to legitimize paternalism, and to mask the reality of the plantation household as a place of work, a public as well as private space.

The bulk of her primary sources are slave narratives and memoirs, as well as letters and diaries by white mistresses. Glymph reads both with a critical and discerning eye, knowing that slave narratives were often recorded under some degree of duress; and the diaries and recollections of mistresses often betrayed an inability to regard slave women as fully human, as women with their own independent needs and desires.

Glymph acknowledges her debt to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who identified the role that paternalism played in creating the myth of the generous, empathetic mistress who cared for her slaves as part of the household. However, Glymph feels that most historians have accepted the idea that mistresses were essentially passive figures who suffered as women, rather than ruled as white women.

Given that this study concerns a world of women, contained within the household which was ideologically considered a place of domesticity and refuge from the public sphere (even though it was a place of coercive labor), it would be interesting to compare it to the works of E.P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm she references in the Introduction. The parallels she briefly notes between her world of determinedly resistant domestic servants, and Hobsbawm’s Revolutionaries, for example, suggest a very different conceptual frame for the book which follows.

The transformation she describes ends in a relatively limited time frame; it would be interesting to tie this study to a more focused examination of relations between white female employers and black female domestic servants in the 20th century. The linkage is briefly considered in the Epilogue, but for the most part this study ends at the dawn of Jim Crow.

The Half Has Never Been Told

Edward E. Baptist. The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.
New York: Basic Books, 2014.

Edward Baptist argues that while the historiography of slavery has evolved, and larger discussions of slavery in American cultural life has shifted away from earlier explanations which either apologized for or even defended slavery; or condemned it as an aberration in American history—the notion that slavery was a fundamentally backward, economically inefficient system has persisted.

This is a fundamental misconception of the role slavery played in American development. Rather, the plantation slave economy that developed in the wake of the explosive growth of cotton growing in the southern United States was integral to American economic expansion—to the contrary, it both drove and financed it.

Baptist relies heavily on WPA Slave narratives, which he reads carefully in order to account for the bias imposed by white-dominated institutional and cultural assumptions. He also looks at economic and census data in order to support his argument for the centrality of cotton in the growth of American capitalism.

Baptist seems to be pushing back against the entirety of the literature on slavery. He doesn’t seem to have any particular argument with any specific thrust of the historiographic tradition, whether Edmund Morgan or Eugene Genovese. Rather, he claims that previous considerations of American slavery all operated under the same basic, flawed, assumption.

This book could be connected to studies about the industrial labor movement as well as studies of 20th century sharecropping and migrant labor. Also, his assertion that John Calhoun’s invention of substantive due process was later used by Gilded Age capitalists is an intriguing idea.

His assertion that, as we noted in discussion, “the half has never been told” is more convincing when focused on the degree to which movement and displacement was an integral part of slavery; less so when he implies that the linkage between slavery and the capitalist development of the USA has never been acknowledged. Despite this overreach, Baptist does suggest that slavery studies will look different in the future if we begin with the assumption that this brutal system of labor extraction was always central to the development of America’s political economy.

Finally, the writing here is superb, far above what most academic writers are capable of. The book is structured imaginatively, inspired by a Ralph Ellison essay that in turned borrowed imagery from Swift's Gulliver's Travels in order to declare that American history had been metaphorically written on the body of African-Americans. This provided the structure of the book; Baptist's impassioned, deeply felt, and keenly observed prose style fleshes that structure out.

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America's Jubilee

Andrew Burstein. America's Jubilee: How A Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Burstein first follows the path taken by the Marquis de Lafayette during his extensive tour of the United States in 1824 and 1825. This famous trip found the aged French hero of the Revolution greeted by adoring crowds, former colleagues and soldiers who had served under him, visiting politicians and legislators, being feted and honored, and also being reunited with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The meaning of this trip to Americans--a chance to see the last living general of the Revolution, and an opportunity to witness one of the last living links to that founding struggle on the eve of their nation's 50th year anniversary--would be amplified and reinforced in the months to come as the country prepared to celebrate its "Jubilee".

Burstein then "travels" around the United States of 1826 in a similar roving fashion, but does so mostly to examine the lives and reflections of a diverse group of Americans, some of whom were obscure in their own time, others--such as William Wirt--who were important people, names of consequence, in their own era but have since largely been forgotten.

The result is a book which is more episodic than deeply thematic, and which truly seems to be more a work of portraiture than deep analysis--but that is not a complaint. Burnstein's research takes him from New Orleans to Cincinnati to rural Massachusetts and into Canada. His selection of Americans is eclectic, and he has done excellent work bringing them alive and finding broader meaning and resonance in their disparate stories.

The way in which the narrative returns to the "famous" by finishing with the infamous passings of Jefferson and Adams on the very day of the Jubilee--and an extended consideration of the ways in which the two approached aging and their reconciliation--is effective. This book won't challenge any existing historical arguments, because it isn't really making one. But it brings a particular moment in American history alive, in a way which allows the reader to grasp the texture of life, the mental world of the second generation of Americans, with impressive clarity.

The Elusive Republic

Drew R. McCoy. The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America.
University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

One aspect of 18th and 19th century America which is somewhat foreign to modern readers is the concept of "political economy". The idea that politics and economics are two distinct spheres of activity and expertise is so deeply embedded in modern discourse, and so near-universally accepted at face value, it takes a bit of a conceptual leap for 21st century readers to appreciate that for early Americans, the distinction between the two simply didn't exist.

One important condition which dictated the earlier understanding of a political economy was the ideology of Republicanism and the demands it placed on citizens and office holders. The Republican ideology was concerned with the overall development of society, not merely the legal and constitutional order. In order to reconstruct that mentality, McCoy begins with a discussion of the concepts of social decay and corruptions, which obsessed Enlightenment-era thinkers and statesmen. These notions were bound up in natural science as understood at the time, and posited a natural life-cycle for nations and societies. So much of the Republican ideology was based on the desire to avoid corruption and also to delay the "aging" of a society towards old age and decadence.

Therefore, corruption wasn't only caused by bad actors or abuse of power; it was also the result of an unbalanced economy which failed to provide a rough equality for all citizens; an equality which, it was generally accepted, was best provided through widespread land ownership by independent farmers practicing self-sufficiency, home manufacture of necessities, and only a very limited involvement in the market for manufactured goods which were not "luxuries" as defined at the time.

The commercial revolution which early America experienced (along with the British) therefore challenged Republican notions, as it provided numerous opportunities for ordinary citizens to be tempted to engage in "corrupting" economic practices, even as it created the conditions for an increase in speculative business and a more diversified economy.

Throughout the Federalist years, the Jeffersonians perceived threats to the Republic from the Hamiltonian agenda, but once the election of 1800 gave them control over the national government, their own beliefs were constantly challenged by the ways in which the global economy refused to behave in ways republican theory said they should. Most notably, American independence did not translate to fully free trade for American exports, which hurt the US economy but also threatened to create an agricultural surplus which would deprive farmers of the necessary incentive for continued labor and diligence. Or, worse, would create the conditions favorable for large-scale manufacturing and the wage-earning poor who provided the labor for that.

Over the years, through the Madison administration and beyond, the Jeffersonian vision changed to adopt to new situations. Thomas Jefferson himself never moved beyond his agrarian ideal more than absolutely necessary (as he understood it); more problematic was his refusal to reckon with slavery and its cost to his republican ideal. James Madison, on the other hand, was able to consider different ways in which society would need to adjust in order to maintain republican principles even as changing conditions, the inevitable peopling of the vast but finite lands to the west, and the equally inevitable growth of the manufacturing sector, all worked in tandem to change the world in ways that the republicans of the Revolutionary era had considered crucial and necessary.

The Wages of Whiteness

David R. Roediger. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
Verso, 1991, 2007 (Second Edition)

Roediger addresses one glaring shortcoming of a purely materialist interpretation of nineteenth-century working class racism from a Marxist perspective. This study examines the shortcomings of regarding such racism as being primarily either a reaction to perceived job competition or an ideological device used to divide the working class on behalf of the rising capitalist class. Roediger argues that the former ignores the degree to which "whiteness" was a key element of white labor's image of itself, and the latter for denying the agency with which the white working class often defined itself explicitly as "white."

It is the latter point which is more important here. Roediger acknowledges that there was certainly a "pre-history" of whiteness as a self-conscious identity prior to the antebellum period, but the colonial era was also marked by a great deal of deference and social hierarchy along with the degradation of indentured servitude to mitigate against "whiteness" becoming a fully-developed, positively-asserted identity. Borrowing from W.E.B. DuBois, Roediger argues that the Revolution asked questions of older assumptions about social and economic relations even as it provided a new language for citizens to frame themselves within. Nothing new there, except that DuBois argued strongly that too often Americans try to separate race and class as distinct categories. Roediger seeks to show that DuBois was right--they were intimately intertwined in America and cannot be easily separated.

The real rise of the self-consciously "white" working class took place in the antebellum period, as white workers found their own status as independent artisans being degraded and denied. Blacks--defined in the public square as being truly degraded due to their inability to throw off the chains of slavery, were unfit for Republican citizenship--and lower-class whites soon found them a useful "other" to measure themselves against. In the crudest possible terms, working class whites could become poor and destitute, but they could never be black. Their whiteness, then, became a key part of their identity.

Nobody in antebellum America more desperately cherished this lifeline from "wage slavery" than the Irish, who suffered from discrimination and economic marginalization at the hands of "native" whites to a much greater degree than any other European immigrant group. The Irish ultimately chose whiteness over solidarity with the free blacks they often lived in close proximity with. As Roediger notes, the notion of job competition is probably highly overstated, as in reality the Irish had very little trouble pushing blacks aside for the menial labor jobs they were competing for. It wasn't the competition they were fighting against, it was the notion that they were doing "nigger work". One way to combat that was to exclude blacks altogether.

The Civil War undermined the antebellum commitment to overt white supremacy among the white working class, but ultimately old habits of thought and the failure of the Republican Party to craft a new coalition of northern whites and southern blacks doomed the possibilities of Reconstruction race relations and beyond.

Liberty and Power

Harry L. Watson. Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. (Updated edition)
Hill and Wang, 1990 and 2006.

This updated edition of Watson's influential synthesis history of the politics of Jacksonian era traces the roots of the Second Party System to social anxieties generated by the rise of the Market Revolution, within the context of the republican tradition bequeathed to the Early Republic by the Revolution. Republicanism, as understood by early Americans, posited a fundamental--even existential--conflict between "liberty" and "power" in which the latter was an implacable foe of the former.

As the afterword to this updated edition acknowledges, this simple formulation contains some premises which subsequently merited reconsideration. There has been much debate on the degree to which republicanism was a genuinely felt and coherent ideology in the early Republic. The concept of the Market Revolution has been challenged both by those who believe that America was already a fundamentally capitalist society from the colonial period forward, and those who argue that there was no "revolution" but rather a gradual, continuous evolution which either predated, postdated, or overlapped the generally accepted periodization.

These are not insignificant questions, but Watson concludes that while research subsequent to the 1990 publication of his work has often raised important and thought-provoking challenges to his guiding assumptions, the essentials of his argument are still valid. Therefore, his argument needs to be accepted within that framework.

The end of the War of 1812 removed two existential threats to American sovereignty--the British presence in the West; and their support for the Indian nations who lived there. This freedom allowed Americans to turn their attention towards the settlement and development of the trans-Allegheny west, but it also removed the pressures which had subtly reinforced the tendency to distrust and fear partisan divisions within society. The specter of "corruption" and "interest" which orthodox republicanism accepted as fatal to republican societies would begin to flourish seemingly everywhere in the rush to move west and participate in an increasingly diverse national economy where local economic production was increasingly directed towards distant markets.

The ongoing collapse of traditional community ties of reciprocity and mutual regard created a mood of anxiety and fear which manifested itself in different ways depending on circumstance, time, and place. In this regard, Watson considers such phenomena as Anti-Masonry, labor agitation, and the Second Great Awakening as being related to the same stresses and challenges which the Second Party System ultimately evolved to manage.

Because in the end, Watson argues that we should listen to Americans of the Jacksonian era when they tell us what they were trying to accomplish. We should be skeptical of arguments which discount the policies and beliefs over which Democrats and Whigs fought over as being unworthy of the effort and energy expended merely because the interests in question weren't always clearly defined; or that there were deeper processes at work which they were not fully aware of underlying the dynamic of their political system. Rather, Watson argues that while often the rhetoric and practices of the Second Party System don't always sync up with direct linkages to immediately obvious social pressures, a deeper analysis finds a consistent pattern in which not only did party politics address the ways in which these underlying anxieties were articulated, but also the political leadership were self-consciously seeking to ally the stresses of society not by denying or suppressing them, but by channeling them into engagement with a national, two-party system.

The glaring exception, of course, was slavery--one issue which was starkly geographical and for which the two-party system could not ultimately defuse. But despite that moral failing--and despite the fact that the Second Party System itself would not survive the ultimate national reckoning with that sin--the basic parameters of politics which was established in the Jacksonian age would survive, and continue to shape the American political system.

William Cooper's Town

Alan Taylor. William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic. Vintage Books, 1995.

Before it became the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, before it became known as the place where Abner Doubleday almost certainly did not invent baseball itself, Cooperstown, NY was known as the place James Fenimore Cooper immortalized in some of his novels; most notably in his early work The Pioneers. Best known now for introducing the seminal American character of Natty Bumppo, the novel was originally something of a wish-fulfillment reclamation of a lost patrimony by the son of the town's founder and namesake--William Cooper.

William Cooper was a man who worked his way up from a humble beginning as a wheelwright in late colonial society towards being a landlord of means in the new Republic. He did so through measures which were often bold, occasionally reckless, and all too often at odds with the wishes and best interests of his patrons--members of the old elite whom Cooper wanted to impress and eventually count himself among. Cooper proved quite adept--and very lucky--at taking advantage of the disruptions to established social and economic norms in the wake of the upheaval of the Revolution. Soon, he found himself in possession of thousands of acres of upstate New York land, and the status as landlord and patron to a new community.

Cooper never attained the gentility to go with his wealth that he desired, but neither did he embrace the politics of Republicanism that his humble origins and his own life story might have naturally inclined him towards. Rather, Cooper became a staunch Federalist and never wavered from this affiliation, even in the wake of the decline of Federalism in the years after Jefferson's election as President, as Republicans took power at all levels of state government in New York.

His downfall would come not only from the decline of Federalism but from ongoing economic and demographic changes which both challenged his control of his original holdings in the Cooperstown area, and overwhelmed his ability to maintain payments on his ever-growing debts. Cooper, dazzled by his own early success, sought to replicate it elsewhere in New York, to no avail. He over-extended himself, and tangled his estate even further into a web of debts, dubious property claims, and conflicting obligations.

He never resolved those issues, but rather passed them on in a will that was more generous and lucrative towards his heirs on paper than it was in reality. The Cooper children soon discovered that their inheritance was mortgaged to the hilt, and over the next decade and a half (roughly) creditors took it all away. Neither Cooper nor most of his offspring lived to see the final decimation of his once-impressive holdings, but his youngest son James did.

James Cooper (he added the "Fenimore" in his 30's not long before embarking on his wildly successful writing career--the only profession he ever succeeded at) sought to recast the history of his father and his hometown in ways which both restored the family fortune but also restored the ideal of social harmony and deference to betters which both he and his father believed in, despite the relentless tide of democratic leveling the country was going through. Read that way, The Pioneers is an idealized history of the early American republic which pointed the way towards a peaceful, stable, harmonious future which only existed in the dreams of Federalists like William Cooper and in the bestselling books written by his son.

The Democratic Party and the Negro

Lawrence Grossman. The Democratic Party and the Negro: Northern and National Politics, 1868-1892. University of Illinois Press, 1976.

The years between the end of the Johnson Administration and the second election of Grover Cleveland was a time of experimentation and attempted realignment by African-Americans within the two party electoral system. The Republican Party began the era with the solid support of the Black electorate, while the Democratic Party was largely defined by the unabashed white supremacy of the southern wing. However, important shifts in policy and regional party affiliations. For awhile, some Black political leaders were able to advocate a more independent stance by African-American voters as a significant minority--largely in north--were willing to consider switching parties to the Democratic column.

This was possible in the wake of the "new departure", a Democratic policy of explicit acceptance of the new constitutional order imposed by Reconstruction, backed by the implicit understanding that a staunch commitment to state's rights meant that enforcement of formal legal protections could be quietly dropped. Yet, as cynical as this policy was (and ultimately successful), for much of the period covered by this book it allowed for both African-American voters to rethink political alliances, and for Northern Democrats to opt to reject, and sometimes even overtly challenge, racist political rhetoric and policies.

While never more than a minority movement in the North, and proportionately even less important in the South, black political leaders found that they had real leverage within the northern Democracy, possibly peaking during the first Cleveland administration.

However, the corollary of the "new departure"--that northern Democrats would prioritize state's rights over civil rights--eventually triumphed. The political strength that African-Americans had seemingly discovered proved largely ephemeral; the end result of splitting the black vote allowed racists within the Democratic Party to reassert their hegemony over northern Democrats as fading Republican commitment to civil rights acceded to the developing social Darwinist ideology of racial hierarchy, as well as as a bipartisan agreement to leave Southern race relations in the hands of state authorities.

The Market Revolution

Charles Sellers. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846.

Oxford University Press, 1991.

Sellers's book was a major reevaluation of the period when first published a quarter-century ago; it's still an important survey of the period. Sellers covers a lot of ground--each chapter is somewhat thematic in approach, even as they very slowly move the chronology forward--but largely keeps focused on a single, broadly-defined arena. He argues that this era saw the negotiation of power between capitalism and democracy in the early phase the growth of the market economy unleashed in the wake of the conclusion of the War of 1812. Carries out in the fields of politics, religion, and social change, the overriding conflict involved the tension between the imperatives of the forces of the market versus the political fact of an increasingly empowered electorate which included many groups which were either leery of the market or sought to tame it or redirect it in accordance with their values and interests. 

Sellers locates much of this tension in the conflict between two very different religious impulses: arminianism and antinomianism. The distinction between the two reflected two different moral economies (my phrase, not Sellers') which ultimately needed to accommodate each other in the new democratic capitalist orthodoxy--one which, at the conclusion of this period, still contained the fatal contradiction of slavery. The tension over slavery would be push the polity to the breaking point in the wake of James Polk's recklessly successful efforts to annex new lands for expansion while ignoring the niceties of sectional balance. 

A Shopkeeper's Millennium

Paul E. Johnson. A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837. Hill and Wang, 1978 and 2004.

This is the 25th-Anniversary edition of Johnson's book; it includes a new introduction in which he responds to the criticism and commentary generated in response since the initial publication. Johnson admits that the original study was very much a product of the New Social History movement which by the late 70's was already hitting its limits (unbeknownst to practitioners such as himself). He also recognizes that religious history is a much more developed sub-field than it was then, and many religious historians have taken exception to what they perceive as a reductionist strain in his approach. Having conceded that he no longer accepts the positivist assumptions behind the new social history approach, and that he should have been more circumspect and qualified in some of his assertions, he still stands by the essential premise--that the phenomenon of mass conversion in Rochester in the wake of Charles Finney was grounded in specific social and economic conditions.

I don't think Johnson underestimates the importance of sincere religious belief, and those critics who accuse this book of being reductionist are (understandably) mistaken. Instead, Johnson acknowledges that the converts were responding to religious appeals--but he also argues that they framed many social anxieties of the time in religious terms.

The context of Rochester is, Johnson admits, not "typical" but rather exceptional. Rochester was exceptionally tied to, and affected by, the social and economic changes wrought by the Eric Canal. Sitting on the falls of the Genesee River where the canal met it, Rochester was well positioned as a manufacturing center as well as a midpoint on the canal. As a result it grew quickly, and experienced the changes in the relationship between business and labor that marked the early years of the Market revolution.

The decline in the apprentice system and more importantly the decrease in the older values in mutuality reinforced by journeyman and workers living with their employers as part of the household had the effect of removing the working class from earlier forms of social control. This also denied the social elite an important means of imposing that control even as they tried to maintain existing social and cultural norms in which their status and self-respect were bound up in that control.

Attempts to restore social control through coercion--particularly regarding temperance crusades--not only failed, they also divided the middle class elite against each other. At the same time, the rise of more democratic politics in the form of the second party system further divided the elite even while empowering the working class against them.

Finney's crusade, then, came at a time when the elite were searching for purpose and validation--the fact that converts sincerely experienced spiritual and theological revelations and changes does not negate the suggestion that these new ideas also met pressing social anxieties.

Johnson concludes the book with a chapter detailing the success Finney's middle-class converts had in bringing a sizable minority of working class peoples into the fold. These latter converts were explicitly accepting a bourgeoisie religion and the values of self-restraint and individual economic activity; a basis for the Free Labor movement to follow.

The Artificial River

Carol Sheriff. The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862.
Hill and Wang, 1996.

Sheriff's study isn't another look at the role the Erie Canal played in the transportation or market revolutions, or in westward expansion. Instead, she studies the people who lived and worked on the canal itself. The time frame extends from the beginning of construction to the completion of the Enlargement project (during which the canal was made deeper and wider, and numerous "feeder" extension canals were added to the original route), which she notes almost exactly coincides with the years between the end of the War of 1812 and the Civil War.

While each of the six chapters has a different focus, the overall theme is the way in which the idea of "progress" evolved over the period even as its meaning and utility was challenged by different social groups and economic interests. The different meanings of "progress"--economic, social, cultural, and even religious--meant different things at different times to different people. Initial expectations that the canal would create a harmony of social and economic interests would be increasingly dashed even as the canal created the conditions which led to unprecedented economic growth and a rapid increase in market-oriented activity. The tension between republican ideology and the realities of liberal capitalism paralleled larger conflicts in antebellum society. Democrats and Whigs both contended with the rise of the new market economy and the ideology of improvement--neither party opposed it but rather argued over the ramifications of the fraying of older social mores and the increase in class competition (which, many middle-class Whigs believed, did not necessarily have to translate into class conflict).

In the end, the canal changed the world of upstate New York so fundamentally that most people in 1862 took those changes for granted; the "artificial river" now seemed "second nature" in a dual sense; it was not only an organic part of the social and economic world they lived in, but it seemed less artificial and more natural than it had a generation or more prior.

Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson

William C. Dowling. Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1801-1811. University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

This is a work of literary study rather than history; it is still an interesting investigation of Federalism as an intellectual movement, grounded in classical republicanism and the American experience.

According to Dowling, the magazine The Port Folio, under the editorship of Joseph Dennie (who died at the age of 44 in 1811) began as a mouthpiece for vigorous Federalist opposition to the rise of Jeffersonian Republicanism (or "American jacobinism") but eventually Dennie came to the conclusion that the rise of the demos (the people) driving Jefferson's triumph would be permanent and irreversible. Therefore, Federalism retreated from being a primarily political and public stance to being a literary mode of thought, one for those who chose to retreat into a transatlantic "republic of letters" in implicit rejection of the vulgar, market-oriented democratic culture which was now in power. This pose of studied resistance and studious withdrawal became the pose of a particular and important strain in American literature, passed along first through Washington Irving and then Thoreau, Melville, and finally culminating in Henry James and Santayana.

This is a short study which approaches the fate of Federalism in a novel way, as according to Dowling, Dennie and others were already resigned to the perpetual marginalization of Federalism even before the War of 1812 and the aftermath of the Hartford Convention.

Magic Lands

John M. Findlay. Magic Lands: Western Cityscapes and American Culture After 1940.
University of California Press, 1992.

Findlay's book focuses on four "magic lands" in the post-World War II era; I presume the choice of 1940 as the beginning of his periodization reflects the importance of the war industry in the growth of the region economically and demographically. The phrase "magic land" is his own descriptor, which he roughly defines as urban areas which were planned districts, distinct from the surrounding metropolitan area, planned in reaction to the specter of unrestricted suburban sprawl, and finally based on or influenced by the first of the four--Disneyland, in Anaheim, California.

Aside from that amusement park, the other three "magic lands" are the Stanford Industrial Park what would become "Silicon Valley"; the Sun City retirement community outside Phoenix, Arizona; and the Seattle World's Fair grounds. Aside from the above-mentioned commonalities, Findlay argues that these collectively had a significant influence on the development of--and, more importantly, the validation of--the distinctively Western style of urban development which came into prominence in from around 1950 through the mid-60's (when concerns about sprawl, crime, poverty, and especially environmental degradation began to resonate in Western politics).

The Western style of urban growth was different from the Eastern style which was grounded in the experience of the 19th century industrial revolution. The latter was centered on a densely-settled central core, and featured mixed-use zoning, an overall high population density, and centered economic and cultural activity in a traditional downtown. According the Findlay, many in the West (including, during this period, many migrants from the East and Midwest) explicitly rejected the Eastern city as the ideal model and sought to create something new. The rapid spread of a newer model based on single-family housing, horizontal rather than vertical growth, and the privileging of the automobile over mass-transit created a radically different model, but it was often a seemingly shapeless and confusingly fast-growing city which struck many as being alienating and featureless. The different "magic lands" in his study were attempts, in various ways, to control, improve, and rationalize the new Western city taking shape.

Findlay makes a strong case that planners, developers, civic leaders, and ordinary citizens in the West sought to create the sprawling, car-centered cityscapes they lived in, and his argument that "magic lands" were archetypal models which influenced the development of much of the suburban built environment much of America calls home today. He works hard--perhaps too hard--to understand these magic lands on their own terms, and to appreciate the ways in which those who lived in them, worked in them, or visited them would have perceived their benefits; while this is laudable and important, he skews the argument so far in that direction that his observations about the ways in which lower-income and non-white communities were adversely affected or at least ignored lack the weight they probably should. And Findlay seems remarkably uninterested in the ultimate costs of the sprawl these magic lands helped legitimize. Or perhaps he believes that is a different story, one which shouldn't overshadow the ways in which these communities were conceptualized and experienced at the time. At any rate, this is a compelling study, worth reading if you are interested in the history of the American West, the postwar suburbs, or the rise of middle-class consumer culture in the post World War II era.

The Whole World is Watching

Todd Gitlin. The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left.
University of California Press, 1980

Gitlin--a veteran of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the New Left struggles of the 1960's--is mostly interested in understanding the ways in which the collapse of the SDS and the subsequent degeneration of the New Left into increasingly militant and hopelessly revolutionary sects and sub-sects. He also wants future (as of 1980) resistance and opposition groups to learn from those failures and adjust to the ongoing hegemony of liberal capitalist society.

As such, this isn't really a book of history although Gitlin does believe that a historical approach is important in the middle section of the book, which traces the process by which the mass media first marginalized, then reacted to, and then finally--due to the sheer force of its attention on the fragile infrastructure and naive leadership of the SDS--destroyed the radical challenge to American military involvement in Vietnam. The later, more broad-based 'moderate' antiwar movement, then, was in some ways used by the media as a respectable norm against which the radicals could be conceptualized as a disreputable--and marginalized--other.

Ironically, Gitlin published this shortly before the Reagan era--the liberal establishment represented by the New York Times and the TV network news organizations was on its last legs, something he cannot be faulting for not foreseeing. Part I and Part III are most interesting to those with an interest in New Left politics, media criticism, and the Marxist concept of hegemony. Part II, will also be of special interest to historians interested in a particular perspective on the rise and fall of the SDS and Sixties radicalism in general.

Barbarian Virtues

Matthew Frye Jacobson. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. Hill and Wang, 2000.

Matthew Frye Jacobson proposes a close relationship/parallel between American expansionist foreign policy and immigration policy domestically during the Progressive era. In his telling, there was not only a strong relation between the two but in some ways they were part of the same process. Fundamentally, the rise of industrial capitalism and the accompanying fear of over-production prodded both the search for new overseas markets (particularly in Asia) and created the need for a steady and ample supply of low-skill, low-wage labor. Thus, even as Americans were being driven to annex or obtain de facto control over distant territories—and negotiating how to incorporate these “non-white “peoples into the American polity in some way—they were also confronting the influx of enormous numbers of non-Anglo-Saxon, non-Protestant immigrants who simultaneously served the economic needs of the new economy while providing a scapegoat for its excesses and civic and social shortcomings.

Jacobson makes the connection between the then-mainstream phenomenon of scientific racism and both foreign policy and the developing immigration regime developing during the era. He also makes it clear that the time period covered represented an era of continuity between nineteenth century Manifest Destiny and twentieth century expansionism and globalized foreign policy. This is a facet of American history which has been ignored too often; this amnesia helps feed a false dichotomy between an earlier, allegedly less tumultuous period of mass immigration versus contemporary controversies.

The Liberal State on Trial

Jonathan Bell. The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years.
Columbia University Press, 2004.

Bell argues that the existence of an ideological threat from the far left during the early Cold War not only determined the course and development of foreign policy--or even of domestic politics (as Mary Dudziak has argued), it also limited the potential for left-wing social democratic politics. Bell agrees with historical accounts which stress the emphasis that Cold War liberalism placed on individual civil rights; his contention is that while other scholars have stressed the institutional limitations of New Deal liberalism or the ideological value of addressing state-level segregation and other violations of civil rights through legislative and judicial means, it was in fact the rise of anti-statism in American political discourse during the Truman era which ultimately restricted the ability of liberals to embrace or even flirt with left-of-center politics at any level. The Cold War created a domestic political climate in which the specter of being anywhere on the left was toxic. Liberalism survived by embracing the language of anti-statism; which in turn limited the degree to which liberals could defend the previous Popular Front accomplishments of the New Deal state and CIO unionism.

This is also, in some ways, a partial history of the rise of the new Right, as conservatives slowly learned over the course of the several election years studied here, how effective the language of anti-statism was. By attacking their opponents as either left-wing sympathizers themselves or as merely dupes of world Communism, Republicans and conservatives were able to put liberal defenders of the New Deal and the Fair Deal on the defensive, while also pushing the latter to embrace rhetoric which might have made tactical sense but which undermined the legitimacy of the liberalism they were tied to. Ultimately, only be embracing anti-statism as vigorously as their opposition could liberals hope to survive by 1952, which was the peak of this strand of new political culture.

The Straight State

Margot Canday. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America.
Princeton University Press, 2009.

Canady argues that because the American national state was late in developing--specifically, because (unlike Western European states) it formed after the "discovery" of  homosexuality by sexologists in the late nineteenth century (2)--the state itself took a leading role in creating a definition of homosexuality as part of the larger process of defining citizenship and policing the borders of the latter. As she admits in the conclusion, the result is a study which necessarily has little to say about the suffering and injustice suffered by an unknown number of Americans, resident aliens, and immigrants who were--or were suspected of--"homosexuality" as it was (often ill-) defined by various agencies and individual bureaucrats. On the other hand, what this study lacks in terms of the perspective of those who felt the brunt of state power, it makes up for in its nuanced and focused examination of how "the State" was actually personified by the individuals responsible for articulating and interpreting policy and law at the level of implementation.

Canady argues for the slow development of a binary notion of citizenship along the axis of sexuality; by the 1960's, the state had defined people as either heterosexuals or homosexuals, with the latter being unworthy of full citizenship. The development of this binary was a long process--while many historical accounts date the Federal codification of homophobia to the McCarthy era, Canady argues that the Cold War "lavender scare" was rather the culmination of a much longer process dating back to turn-of-the-century attempts to control immigration, then growing with the mobilization of World War I and later the rise of the New Deal State, finally culminating in World War II. The Second World War, unlike the First, lasted long enough so that the inclusion of a significant percentage of the population in the military created an imperative to determine the "fitness" of Americans and their sexual behavior and adherence to gender norms. The mechanisms created to police this would, like the military-industrial complex itself, survive the end of the war, where they would be further refined and institutionalized to meet the ideological aims of the Cold War state.

The hard-and-fast binary nature of Canady's analysis might be a little too pat, but her emphasis on how notions of homosexuality were intertwined with notions of defining citizenship in conjunction with the rise of the state is interesting. Her insight that there was an inversion built in to the liberal state--that the Federal government took the lead in pushing back against state and local laws limiting racial civil rights while simultaneously creating limitations on homosexual rights--is interesting as well.

The Age of Fracture

Daniel T. Rodgers. Age of Fracture. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011.

Despite the partisan nature of Presidential politics, the Cold War era saw the rise of a over-arching style of Presidential rhetoric which was broadly shared by Democrats and Republicans alike. The era of what Rodgers seems to define (although never explicitly names) as the era of the Cold War Presidency came to a rhetorical end during the early years of Reagan's time in office. Reagan removed the agency of presidential action and the language of shared national sacrifice from his speeches; instead, he increasingly moved away from concrete considerations of domestic and international challenges towards vague, cinematic expressions of timeless aspiration and limitless projections of the nation's capacity for greatness (however defined).

After noting this shift in rhetoric, Rodgers states that Reagan was reflecting rather than driving broader social and cultural shifts. The rest of the book casts a wide net--regarding race, gender, power, and more--creating a portrait of a society fragmenting into ever-morphing and re-shifting segments and strata. The certainties of the Cold War and the foundations of post-New Deal liberalism all fell apart in the wake of the upheavals and intellectual ferment of the late 60's.

Much of this is framed in the context of the rise of market-based thinking; essentially, the language and values of free-market capitalism seeped into the discourse of sociopolitical thinking, either driving or at the least exacerbating the fragmentation of society in the final three decades of the 20th century. Rodgers teases out a dizzying array of intellectual trends and developments, but the triumph of "the market" over any consensual basis for what "society" might be is the unifying idea running through the seemingly disparate chapters.

One Nation, Under God

Kevin M. Kruse. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. 
Basic Books, 2015.

Most Americans are aware that "In God We Trust" was adopted as the National Motto in the 1950's; many are also aware that the phrase "Under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the same period. Most accounts have assumed that these changes--and the increased religiosity in political and public life in general--were primarily a product of the Cold War, as American political and social leaders sought to amplify the contrast with the official atheist Communist bloc. But in Kruse's telling, the fusion of faith and conservative politics predated the Cold War. Instead, he traces the origins of the myth of a "Christian America" all the way back before World War II. The rise of what would later become the religious Right was birthed in corporate America, in deep-seated opposition to the liberalism of the Roosevelt years.

Kruse's account locates the center of the rise of the religious Right neither in specific denominations nor even among a particular cadre of politicians (not at first, anyway), but rather in the private sector. First these anti-New Deal corporate interests found common cause with a select group of charismatic and influential ministers like Billy Graham, the push to bring overt religiosity into the Federal government; then they found a willing and able agent in the person of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who shared many of the same values but who failed to utilize the creation of civic religiosity towards the specifically libertarian ends many of his sponsors had hoped to see. On the other hand, his tendency towards vagueness and ideologically-neutral religiosity created a sort of "civic deism" which would give the use of religious language and iconography a permanent home in Washington.

It was up to Billy Graham and Richard Nixon to finish the job of making Republican control of the White House an explicitly religious (and Christian) endeavor. By that point, the nascent religious Right was focused more on the rise of the counterculture and the tumult of the 1960's rather than the economics of the post-New Deal state. Communism was an oft-quoted foe, but it was the fear of domestic fellow-travelers and presumed creeping socialism from within which was the real bogeyman. The language of the Cold War served to validate and institutionalize a process that had begun decades earlier.

The Conquest of Cool

Thomas Frank. The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. University of Chicago Press, 1997

Frank considers the standard binary historical narrative of the 1960's--in which the conformist, sterile world of the Fifties was challenged from below by a youth-driven counterculture which was fundamentally at odds with the conservative world of corporate capitalism, only to be eventually co-opted by the latter in the wake of post-Vietnam/post-Watergate disappointments--to be at odds with what he learned studying business management literature of the era, as well as the advertising that supposedly change-averse Madison Avenue created. In Frank's telling, the counterculture came not as a shock to the leaders of advertising in the 60's, but rather as the producer of a welcome ready-made vocabulary to express the dynamic structural and conceptual changes they felt the industry needed. The counterculture was seen as an ally and a source of energy, ideas, and (superficial) content by the men (and some women) who sought to remake the world of advertising and consumption in 1960's America.

The dissatisfaction with conformity and older modes of consumption were bubbling in the world of advertising and business long before the counterculture came along to be supposedly co-opted. The embrace of "youth" and "youthfulness" wasn't just about a large and affluent new demographic group--after all, Frank points out that the advertising of the era had little to say to young members of Nixon's "Silent Majority". Instead, constant appeals to "youthfulness" allowed advertisers to transcend previous discourses of consumerism which were stale and no longer effective.

The rhetoric of rebellion and non-conformity for their own sake--as virtues in and of themselves--became the basis of the new consumerism; one which is with us still.

Citizenship in Cold War America

Andrea Friedman. Citizenship in Cold War America: The National Security State and the Possibilities of Dissent. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014.

In the Introduction, Friedman admits that her book "tell citizenship stories that at first glance seem only loosely related, although a close reading will reveal the many ways in which they overlap and intertwine." (12) There is much to admire in her book, but in the end even a second or third look will likely leave the reader feeling that the commonalities between the five chapters are not strong enough or convincing enough to justify the title or the contention that there is a large truth about citizenship being told here. If one sets aside the claims made in the Introduction and the even-less-convincing Conclusion, however, the reader can profit from this book as a collection of five Cold War-era case studies in which a handful of themes recur to varying degrees.

The problem with Friedman's attempt to turn this collection of case studies into a cohesive argument is that she shifts the center of her interpretive framework back and forth through the book. While Chapter 1 puts the emphasis squarely on Cold War psychology, later chapters will focus more on the concept of state violence and its legitimization as well--the psychological focus is still there, but it's hard to see how much the chapter on juvenile delinquency and comic books has to do with Cold War citizenship. The commonalities that actually do tie Chapters 2 through 5 together have more to do with the ways in which psychology was used to either resist or justify state violence against various groups and individuals than with Friedman's argument on the shaping of citizenship by dissent.

There are many interesting tangents in this book--considerations of how Communism was defined in contrast to "healthy" psychologies; the role of masculinity and aggression in defining Cold War citizenship; the degree to which state violence was justified and masked by the emerging security state; and more. Friedman might have been better off dividing this study into more than one book, as some of the chapters only hint at what might be a more fleshed out narrative given time and space to provide context. Also, she sometimes fails to make it clear where the reader's focus should be. Chapter 4, a study of Puerto Rican nationalism, does not focus on the ostensible subject until more than halfway through.

Cold War Civil Rights

Mary L. Dudziak. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.

During the the early decades of the Cold War, the United States sought to win the ideological battle against the Soviet Union by stressing the positive aspects of a democratic system to those of a totalitarian Communist model. One glaring weakness for the American argument was the reality of institutional racism and legal segregation within American society and institutions such as the military. In the post-colonial era, as the majority of African nations and many Asian nations won their independence from European colonialism, the global image of the second-class status of African-Americans was increasingly seen as a liability by high-ranking foreign policy officials, congressional leaders, and several Presidents. The "world was watching" as African-Americans fought for equal rights, as Brown v. Board of Education worked its way through the Supreme Court, as Arkansas National Guardsmen prohibited black students from attending Central High School in Little Rock; and so on.

Dudziak recreates the history of America's domestic Civil Rights struggle from the vantage point of a political elite that was keenly aware of what governments, media outlets, activists, and public opinion polls were saying in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Communist bloc. This isn't an international history, but rather a domestic history that acknowledges that rigid boundaries between different conceptual approaches to American history can distort our understanding of the very subject we are trying to focus on.

The centrality of foreign opinion to Civil Rights considerations by the foreign policy establishment came to an end in the second half of the 1960's for a variety of reasons. The establishment of formal, legal equality was in line with American ideals of democratic equality; the subsequent shifting of attention to more class-based issues was outside of the accepted narrative for the pro-capitalist establishment. The growing radicalization of the movement cleaved the previous national consensus on Civil Rights. And increasingly, the Vietnam War, not the Civil Rights struggle, would define America's image overseas.

America's Cold War

Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall. America's Cold War: The Politics of Insecurity. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009.

Craig and Logevall approach the Cold War from the vantage point of domestic politics. They acknowledge that this approach is somewhat out of step with the more internationalist vantage point may other scholars take, but while they concede that the internationalist view has ample merit and is an important endeavor, they point out that excessively “de-centering” the Cold War “runs the risk of assigning greater agency to these other actors than they deserve” (5). The power balance was asymmetrical; furthermore, the documentary records that so many historians rely on tend not to reflect domestic political considerations but rather internal foreign policy deliberations. Ultimately, the authors conclude that while the Cold War was largely a success for the United States, it went on too long and at too high a cost relative to the actual security threat posed by the USSR. Cold War policy was vested in the executive branch from the Truman Administration on, and too often, Presidents based policy on their own political fortunes as well as those of their party (LBJ in particular worried about the fate of his Great Society initiatives). Therefore, the United States often chose confrontation when containment would do, and all too often made moral compromises and inflicted military violence on foreign populations for no clear foreign policy advantage.

The structure of the book in chronological, beginning during the mid-years of World War II and ending during the Presidency of George H.W. Bush. This straight-forward structure is framed by a 1984 speech by one of the original architects of the Cold War containment strategy, George F. Kennan. Kennan had long been leery of the degree to which his original strategic approach to the Soviet threat had taken on a life of its own, un-moored from actual strategic considerations or the capabilities of the Soviet Union. By 1984, he was concerned enough to give a public speech in the midst of Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign on the subject.

The authors clearly agree with Kennan's larger view, but at the same time they argue that the Cold War was in arguably an American success; the Soviet Union was ultimately vanquished, and the American people were able to enjoy relatively peace and historically unparalleled prosperity during the conflict. In other words, Kennan's basic premise--that the USSR represented a genuine security threat, which could be best faced by boxing it in internationally and forcing its internal contradictions to undo it--was entirely correct. Had US Cold War policy adhered to the policy of containment, the triumph would have been relatively unambiguous.

But, unfortunately, domestic political pressures--the rightward shift of American foreign policy, the growing political clout and economic importance of the military-industrial complex, etc.--mitigated against restricting American policy to the parameters Kennan had sketched out. President after President felt compelled to prove himself "tough on Communism" and to escalate military posturing when diplomacy often might have been more effective. The Cold War was an American victory, but the cost was unjustifiably high.

Gay New York

George Chauncey. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Makings of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books (Harper Collins), 1994.

Contemporary accounts of the gay rights movement tend to begin with, or right around the Stonewall Riot of 1969. A common assumption of these narratives is that gay Americans had been living closeted lives continuously throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to that point, when the example of the Civil Rights movement and the loosening of traditional social constraints in the Sixties finally allowed gays to assert themselves in the public sphere. Chauncey directly challenges that orthodoxy, recreating a history of a gay world prior to World War II which was more open, more publicly visible, and to a degree even more accepted than later generations of homosexual Americans would experience. This is both a history and a reclamation project.

There are a handful of themes underlying this broad account. In dealing with these concepts, Chauncey first explains that the terms we now use to discuss gay people and gay culture would not apply to this era. People in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not make the clear distinction between homosexuals and heterosexuals. They did, on the other hand, make a distinction between "fairies" (or "pansies" in later decades of the time frame covered), who were men for whom "homosexuality" was determined not by sexual preference but by gender behavior; a man was a "fairy" if he behaved in an effeminate manner; his preference for having sexual relations with other men was secondary, or rather a "by-product", so to speak, of his feminine gendered behavior. Therefore, the men who had sex with them were not necessarily considered "gay" in the modern sense, as they played the role of the gendered male in the relationship. The "rough" trade referred to the "normal" men who sought "fairies" or were sought out by them.

"Queers" were another subset of gays; they were marked by a more subdued public persona, and a tendency to distinguish themselves from the fairies. While fairies tended to seek out the "rough" trade for sexual partners, queers very often sought out romantic and sexual relationships with other queers. And it is worth noting at this point--this book is a story about gay men, not homosexuals in general. Chauncey explains this choice for two reasons. First, standard gender roles for all people at the time strictly limited the autonomy and freedom of movement women had compared to men, so that the world that lesbians moved in was different, and more restricted, than the "Gay New York", which coexisted within the geographic space of "normal" New York, in which gay men negotiated their own lives. Secondly, as noted above the concept of "homosexuality" was not yet defined, so that there was not yet the perceived commonality of interests between gay men and lesbians which later generations would acknowledge.

In general, Chauncey argues that acceptance of gay men was more common in immigrant and working-class communities than in middle-class and Anglo-American culture. The general narrative of the book, in fact, builds from this beginning towards the Prohibition era when gay culture found a more welcoming home in "proper" society as one consequence of the Volstead Act driving nightlife "underground" (sometimes literally, as in the case of many speakeasies) so that middle- and upper-class patrons ended up rubbing shoulders with organized crime figures, for example, while patronizing clubs that commodified the "exotic" by offering a sanitized look at African-American or homosexual life in places like, respectively, the Cotton Club and the Pansy Club.

The backlash against this brief era of acceptance and even celebration of openly gay behavior and unapologetic gay men came to an end with the close of Prohibition and the beginning the Great Depression. The utilization of liquor licensing as a tool of state control drove gay bars underground and gay people themselves to hide their identities more than they had in previous decades. By the time the late 1960's rolled around, the invisibility of gay people and the demonization of homosexuality had come to seem both normal and permanent. The fact that previous generations had known a very different gay New York was largely forgotten outside of the gay community itself.

Fear Itself

Ira Katznelson. Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time. Liveright Publishing, 2013.

Katznelson justifies writing yet another comprehensive history of the New Deal by focusing on two facets of the era which have largely been overlooked—the degree to which fear and uncertainty, rather than optimism and energy, characterized the entire period; and the degree to which the political muscle of the Solid South dictated both the potential and the eventual limitations of New Deal liberalism. Southern Democrats were not only a powerful bloc with a shared interest in preserving the system of racial segregation in their region, they also had the benefit of seniority at the dawn of the era, given that many Northern and Western Democrats were new to Congress in the wake of FDR’s sweep into power. Their command of committee seats and parliamentary procedure further magnified their importance in the New Deal coalition. Willing to go along with populist economics, and often taking the lead on a spectrum of issues including Social Security and peacetime military buildup in the years leading up to World War II, but increasingly allying with Republicans in opposition to policies and legislation which threatened the foundations of segregation, the Southern branch of the party decisively shaped the form of modern American liberalism in ways which severely compromised the idealism and fundamental assumptions of the early New Deal.

Katznelson's argument is coherent and consistent for the first three (of four) parts, and then the first of three chapters in the final part; at that point, he takes an interesting but somewhat disorienting shift in emphasis. His time frame extends a full twenty years, from the election of FDR through the election of Dwight Eisenhower. This means that the final years of the New Deal coincided with the beginning of the Cold War. The idea that the Southern Democratic-dominated New Deal state took a leading role in crafting the essential foundations of the emerging national security state is an interesting one. But, perhaps in an effort to stress the centrality of "fear" to his interpretation, Katznelson turns the final two chapters into an extended consideration of the atomic bomb, and the effect that atomic weaponry had on the shape of the growing national security state. This is an interesting subject, but despite adding a brief discussion on how the Southern bloc supported the accelerating trend toward vesting authority and power in the executive branch, this section seems either tacked-on or rushed. The reader won't necessarily disagree with Katznelson, but might wonder how consistent the interpretive framework is in the book's conclusion.

That said, this is a thought-provoking reconsideration of the New Deal. Katznelson does succeed in forcing the reader to see something that was right there in front of us without ever being really noticed before. 

The Populist Vision

Charles Postel. The Populist Vision. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

This is the story of Americans who found themselves "on the short end" (vii) of drastic economic, technological, and organizational changes in the conditions of life in the final few decades of the nineteenth century. The Populist movement organized rural Americans in an effort to deal with the rise of industrial capitalism and nationalized institutions such as the railroad. Many historians and scholars have portrayed them as anti-modern agrarian idealists, perhaps noble or perhaps deluded, who reacted to inevitable changes in the social order and the economy which they did not fully understood but certainly feared. Postel sets out to correct that narrative. The Populists, he argues, were as thoroughly modern as the forces of capital and corporate power they faced off against. They were not fighting to undo the modern world, but to claim a level of control over their place within it.

Divided into two parts, "Farmers" and "Populists", the book begins with the rise of Farmer's Alliances in the South and the Midwest. These organizations sought to aggregate the economic import of thousands of independent farmers in order to create an organized counterweight to the clout that railroads and northeastern capitalist wielded in the 1870's and 1880's. The Alliances--and other related organizations--also sought to create independent civic, educational, and cultural organizations in their quest to improve rural life and empower rural people.

Ultimately, many rural activists would embrace political action as another tool for gaining economic leverage, and the creation of a third party--the People's Party--was the result. The party was short-lived; the fusion with the candidacy of Democrat William Jennings Bryan led to fracture over compromise, and opened the door for the two major parties (particularly the Democrats) to co-opt much of the Populist agenda; albeit in ways which mitigated against the more strongly democratic elements of that agenda.

Postel does not ignore the racial component of this story--there were African-American Populists, and there were occasions in which whites and blacks collaborated; but white Populism tended towards racism as often as not, and in the end racial solidarity trumped class and agrarian solidarity.

Postel also examines the more esoteric and unconventional nonconformist wing of the Populist movement--the idealists and iconoclasts who challenged conventional moral and intellectual orthodoxies. Once again, he reminds the reader that Populists were modernists, just in a different sense than the forces of urban "reform" and capital which ultimately triumphed.