THIS !
THE REPUBLIC FOR WHICH IT STANDS
The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
By Richard White
Illustrated. 941 pp. Oxford. $35
“The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today,” which Mark Twain co-wrote with Charles Dudley Warner, isn’t much of a novel but it has two strong features. First, a guileful character: the backwoods beauty Laura Hawkins, who falls in with a corrupt United States senator, connives her way to the top of Washington high society, beats a murder rap after a sensational trial, then suddenly dies of remorse (a fate the authors’ wives evidently insisted upon). Second, its excellent title, which remains American historians’ standard label for the fourth quarter of the 19th century.
“The Republic for Which It Stands,” Richard White’s new history of that age, as well as the Reconstruction decade that preceded it, is a capacious and forceful book with a dull title — the inverse of Twain and Warner’s satire. Instead of one arresting character, White develops dozens. (Among them are two Henry Adamses, the dyspeptic historian whom you know and a Louisiana ex-slave who courageously fought white terrorists before he encouraged freed men and women to migrate en masse, first to Liberia, then to Kansas.) The Gilded Age will keep its name, but White’s book ought to worsen its already dismal reputation for sordidness and rapacity.
White, who teaches at Stanford, is one of the nation’s most gifted historians, the author of several important studies of the American West, including a scathing exposé of the giant post-Civil War transcontinental railroads. Like that book, this one, the latest installment in the multivolume Oxford History of the United States, is handsomely written and dense in detail. It is also laced with an irony that sometimes focuses and sometimes plays lightly off White’s outrage at the spoliation he finds almost everywhere he looks.
The age was cynical but White’s book, allowing for a lapse or two, is not. This is because he is drawn to what he describes (in a phrase borrowed from the book’s unsecret hero, the novelist and editor William Dean Howells) as “the common” — the striving middle- and working-class America of shops and neighborhoods, churches and trade unions. These realms, too, were part of the Gilded Age. In mostly unsung ways, they expanded the public good, driven by the promise of a free-labor democracy purged of the oligarchic slavery that died with the Confederacy.
Anything anons ?
Ukfag no homo