Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 Book

Sprinkled throughout with air balls'self-help business guides as disguised anti-masturbatory tracts?'and rim ricochets and backboard bouncers that do not much take away from the otherwise effortless swishing of one ball after another kissing the netting whilst draining smoothly through the centre. In my opinion, Gilded Age to Great War America encompasses one of the most fascinating and pivotal periods in the history of the Great Republic, and Lears' penetrating, witty and sober rendition of that era'with an eye ever open for the instantiations of American yearning through acts of regeneration and rebirth which he seems so attuned to discovering, uncovering, and understanding'is a minor masterpiece. Yes, he has brought an agenda to this work, but he is upfront about it and builds his case right there upon the page'while those figures he does condemn are done so through their own words. What's more, the brief-but-bountiful bibliographic essay that closes out the book is a mouthwateringly rich field guide to prime-grade reading material.

This is one of those memorable works whose tenor is of a kind that arises continually throughout the weeks after the book itself has been closed and shelved; one whose contents simmer in uncooled, ash-draped coals to flare up at intervals when their extinguishment has been taken for granted. I'd be tempted to upgrade it to a full five stars, if only Lears hadn't shown himself prone to applying the individual and anecdotal to the universal and substantive, a Freudian-Marxist lens to events that seem ill-fitted to such a synthetic magnification. The man can definitely write, however, and his reinterpretation of the near half-century that transpired between the antebellum years of the Civil War and those that closed out the First World War is solid and convincing and blessed with much wisdom, no matter that the latter is proffered from a vantage point of hindsight atop an accumulation of historical scholarship and cultural evolution. What Lears has discovered is a country rent in twain by a brutal and devastating conflict, clearly unable'and perhaps unwilling'to reassemble itself into its prior configuration and seeking a transformation that would provide a transcendence to spirits sorely tried by the cataclysmic upheaval that nearly destroyed the fledgling republic. Enveloped from the eastern shores by the Victorian mores that tightly bound polite society, it yet saw the black underclass making a valiant but hopeless effort to assume the full rights and dignities promised them by the conflict in which they had contributed a weighty share; the last decades of autonomy by the Plains and West Coast Indians, endeavoring to maintain their cultures in the face of unceasing white (and Asian) settler onslaught; and the enduring, tumultuous struggle by the agrarian and urban workers to tame the overmighty engines of a burgeoning capitalism even as males everywhere were tempted to exert a treasured-but-elusive masculinity against elements natural and manufactured whilst their female counterparts sought to secure their places'in homestead and, eventually, in academia and the workplace'through the eradication of such ills as drink and warfare that visited the worst of virile masculinity upon them and their children, wreaking havoc in home and hearth where the woman was oft deemed supreme.

The early years of shaky hope for an emancipated and freedom-testing black minority, the gradual closing of the western frontier with its promise of renewal set against boundless land for the taking and trials for both body and spirit in the taming of its open spaces, play out against legislatures and executives at the state and federal level that were proving themselves dispiritingly ripe for corruption by moneyed interests and occupation by bought men. Graft by government and crafts by human-replacing machines were prominent in the onset of the industrial revolution that powered America into the Gilded Age, the flowering of capitalism that swelled the cities with bodies brought in from the countryside or across the ocean from the Old World. Lears works his way through the personal stories, invariably fascinating'especially that of Nat Deadwood Dick Love, the most famous of the black cowboys and a man born into slavery whose early manhood was spent adventuring upon the Great Plains and contented middle-age traversing the rails as a Pullman porter; Henry Adams, the patrician scion of American presidents who cynically eyed the transformation of the republic into a burgeoning and industrious global power; and Eugene Debs, sympathetically portrayed by an admiring Lears as the tolerant author of a uniquely American socialism that proved pivotal to changing the sensibilities of American citizens in a degree sufficient for future socialist implementations'of individuals who partook of these sprawling, busy years of energetic growth, searching and finding in their travails the yearning for a rebirth, for a transcendence of a world increasingly caged in by civilization and brought under the golden boot, corrupt in its operation or corrupting in its influence, that fueled a wide variety of movements and developments: Evangelical Christianity and its reborn revivifications alongside the romantic, idealistic, and even pragmatic turnings that empowered human realizations; the institutionalizing of Jim Crow laws by white supremacists who desired to abate the violence and lawlessness inflicted upon and against blacks by organizing communities in legal segregation; the coalescing of labor movements to offer resistance to the wage-slavery of Victorian Era capitalism; the expansive spread of a mysterious neurasthenia, an affliction of the nerves that debilitated those suffering, perhaps, from the stress of too much civilization; the rise of capital markets and a patrician class grown rich upon insider trading and illegal speculation who, in several pious individuals, possessed a view of themselves as divinely-ordained amassers of wealth obliged to distribute it to improve the very nation pressed down by their moneyed power; the energy imparted by an ever-increasing amount of immigrant groups'German, Slavic, Irish, Italian, Chinese'and the ability of some to assimilate themselves almost painlessly while others (of which the Asian group stands out like a sore thumb) encouraged discrimination due to the exoticness of their culture and appearance; and, with perhaps the most enduring (and bitter) legacy, the imperialist adventurers who sought a rightful place for a God-favored Anglo-American race within the world, dispensing civilization and culture to those savages whose liberation from other imperial powers had been achieved by force of American arms and whose pliability for and adherence to US trading interests would be ensured by the very same.

Lears particularly excels in his depiction of the tumult and struggle of the working class and its agrarian brethren to secure a better position for its members against the dominant power of capital industry and its governmental arm. The colorful personalities that comprised the core who directed the origins of the populist movement are wonderfully and intelligently fleshed out, as is their participation in the ups and downs of the democratic masses who'rebuffed in their efforts to capture the presidency and bind the power of the barons of monopolistic capitalism to the desires of the workers and farmers whose labor was expended in enriching those selfsame business elites'eventually splintered around the turn of the century, with a sizable portion drawn off to join those whose embrace of Darwinian evolution, protestant promise, and the salvational doctrine of change had seen them labelled as Progressives. This coalition, whose primary foundational purpose was to cleanse the state and federal governmental apparatus of the corruption and graft that had infected it during the long reign of the Gilded Age and one that easily morphed into a general laundering of the soft and hard sins of bourgeois capitalism, would lay the foundation of the modern welfare state that developed out of the New Deal after the terrible trials of the Great Depression. Further buttresses are found by the author in the turn towards managerial capitalism during the same period, modeled upon the techniques pioneered by the (semi-fraudulent in Lears' eyes) Frederick Winslow Taylor and brought to fine precision under the purview of such industrial visionaries as Henry Ford and Herman Hollerith. Such was the breadth of the invigorating Progressive spirit that Theodore Roosevelt'a figure who receives a healthy portion of the disparaging analysis administered by Lears upon those whose actions he finds most indictable'crafted a third party to run on such a platform against his Republican successor, Taft, and the lean and toothy Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Wilson dominates the closing chapter of the book, the admixture of conservatism and progressivism that combined in his character serving as both a goad to striving for utopias of peace and harmony and as a prideful anchor that prevented him from accommodation with the means required to deliver upon his vision; yet another American inflamed and impaired by the desire for a rebirth, for the renewal of a world sullied, torn, and exhausted by the sanguine labors of a murderous half-decade that the white city upon the hill might, in effect and in fact, be realized.

This inner longing was the fuel for the majority of the drives for change that make up The Rebirth of a Nation, the pivotal period in which the Great Republic shed the last vestiges of its post-colonial skin and strode forth boldly to suit itself in the garb of a powerful and lucid modernity. A work impressively'and perhaps overly'ambitious, seeing connexions and patterns in disparate groups, times, historical events and cultural memes that may be too complementary and rigorous to withstand a specialized scrutiny or bear the weight of the authorial implications with which they have been laden, this is nonetheless a considerable accomplishment; whether or not one is convinced by the entirety of Lears presentation, it made for a truly absorbing, enlightening, and contemplative experience. I shall never again view those portentous years without my vision being colored by the shades of this excellent author's reinterpretation.