Rebirth of a Nation

Jackson Lears. Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.
New York: Harper Collins, 2009.

In Lears' telling, America during the era between the end of the Civil War and World War I was marked by multiple public manifestations of millions of individual, private yearnings. Americans were, in aggregate if not always collectively, hungry for "regeneration", a concept which suffuses this book and takes a variety of forms.

The first chapter, "The Long Shadow of Appomattox", deals with the legacy of the Civil War--specifically, the legacy of years of brutal combat and hundreds of thousands of fatalities. The war traumatized many, and as it dragged on it raised more and more questions about the causes for which all those lives were sacrificed and so much suffering was inflicted. It became more difficult to question the cause, and more imperative to believe that it was all worth it.

Ultimately, the nation would develop a narrative which justified the "shared sacrifice" of both North and South; a narrative in which the "Anglo-Saxon race" had been tested and committed to blood sacrifice, and a narrative from which African-Americans were excluded. This emphasis on transcendent struggle and redemptive bloodshed would weigh heavily on the next generation which grew up without a similar grand crusade. Thus, men like Theodore Roosevelt--and millions more--looked for some cause, some worth sacrifice to give meaning to an existence many feared was becoming sterile and complacent.

Lears extends this restless quest across many of the familiar conflicts of the period--the agrarian revolt, labor unrest, Progressive reform, racial conflict, and the Spanish-American War--and finds a similar quest for regeneration in all of it. What he doesn't find, more often than not, is uplift--Lears is no cheap cynic, but he is anything but sentimental about this period in American history. He certainly has nothing good to say about Teddy Roosevelt, who epitomizes much of the American character of the time, in ways that Lears is frankly contemptuous of.

The First World War would kill the regenerative impulse just as the exhausting drive to sell the League of Nations to the American people would destroy Woodrow Wilson. But it would come back, he contends, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Learn from history, he implies, or we will be doomed to create needless havoc in search of more dragons to slay.