“Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920”, by Jackson Lears

440 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0060747503

Here I am, traveling back to the Gilded Age with Jackson Lears as my guide in Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920. I’ve expressed before my fascination with this era in some of the other books I’ve read on this topic – like, oh I don’t know, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900 by H.W. Brands (reviewed on September 24th, 2014), After the Ball: Gilded Age Secrets, Boardroom Betrayals, and the Party That Ignited the Great Wall Street Scandal of 1905 by Patricia Beard (reviewed on January 19th, 2015), The Transatlantic Marriage Bureau. Husband hunting in the Gilded Age: How American heiresses conquered the aristocracy by Julie Ferry (reviewed on July 14th, 2017), Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt: The Story of a Daughter and a Mother in the Gilded Age by Amanda Mackenzie Stuart (reviewed on November 15th, 2018), The Gilded Age, 1876–1912: Overture to the American Century by Alan Axelrod (reviewed on August 27th, 2019) and lately The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt by T.J. Stiles (reviewed on December 21st, 2019). So, anyway, here I go again.

Sadly, Rebirth of a Nation is more political polemic than it is historical record. In hindsight the title should have been a dead giveaway, echoing as it does D. W. Griffith’s racist propaganda film, “The Birth of a Nation” (or, even better, the dust-jacket endorsement by Cornel West of Princeton who calls Lears “one of the few preeminent historians of our time… [a]s we dream for a rebirth of America in the age of Obama…” I shoulda known better). But if you enjoy feeling superior to previous generations and the “isms” they were all supposedly captive to, then by all means read this book; otherwise, if you want the full flavor of a complex and still-evolving society, any of the above-mentioned titles will serve you better. This is not to say that all of the author’s favorite themes (racism, militarism, capitalist exploitation, etc. etc. etc.) weren’t present in late 19th Century America; it’s just Lears’ fixation on only these topics forces him into an intellectual straitjacket that allows for little appreciation of the fascinating and multifaceted history of a turbulent, free-spirited nation as it finds itself among the world’s powers. All of this added up to a vibrant, if brutal, economic engine that saw labor productivity increase exponentially which led, inevitably, to greater worker compensation, which is why the United States was an immigrant magnet for the whole of the Gilded Age. Not always a pretty story, but, perhaps, a necessary one for a reunited nation stumbling forward into an unknown future.

Thus, it isn’t a surprise to find that the requisite villains of the piece are the typical cast of Gilded Age Robber Barons (or, in Lears’ too-precious sobriquet, “The Tricksters”): Cornelius Vanderbilt, Daniel Drew, Mark Hopkins, Henry Bradley Plant, Joseph Seligman, Jay Cooke, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Henry Flagler, James Fisk, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, Charles Yerkes, John D. Rockefeller, E. H. Harriman, Henry Clay Frick, John C. Osgood, John D. Spreckels, Andrew W. Mellon, John Warne Gates, James Buchanan Duke, Charles M. Schwab and John Jacob Astor IV, to name a few (but, as bad and wicked as The Tricksters were, it is Theodore Roosevelt for whom Lears damns as embodying all that was intellectually and morally corrupt about fin-de-siècle America, as even the trust-bustin’ 26th President of the United States isn’t as clean and pure as the good professor demands).

Oh, there are heroes to be found here, and they, too, are amongst the usual suspects for a left-wing academic: Robert M. La Follette, the lawyer and politician who represented Wisconsin in both chambers of Congress, served as Governor of Wisconsin and was the 1924 Progressive candidate for President; Eugene V. Debs, the socialist, political activist, unionist, founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World and five-time candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States (and I thought William Jennings Bryan was bad); Woodrow Wilson, politician, lawyer and academic who served as the 28th President of the United States (and the most execrable President we’ve ever had, bar none); William Jennings Bryan, the American politician, orator and perpetual Presidential candidate (although he’s got nothing on Debs); and Jane Addams, the suffragette, settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator and author, to name just a few of those individuals who supposedly fought injustice, imperialism and any other bad “ism”.

Ultimately, Rebirth of a Nation isn’t a chronological history that presents Gilded Age America as a series of stellar personalities and interconnected events, nor is it a thematic history designed to present readers with the sights, sounds, smells, ambience and flavor of a particular place in time; rather, it is an interpretative history that reduces the complexities of an industrializing, populous and far-flung 19th Century America to a series of screeds that a 21st Century academic hack finds repugnant – corporatism, imperialism, militarism, racism, sexism – without once considering that a growing, maturing nation is bound to have its flaws and need to outgrow them. Oh, if only men were perfect and had done everything right from the beginning, rather than being the flawed creatures with prejudices and foibles to overcome, then maybe the modern-day Liberals who look at their nation’s past and see nothing to be proud of would at last look upon their nation with pride, warts and all.

“Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country”, by Simon Winder

528 pages, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN-13: 978-0374192181

After having read three previous book by Simon Winder – the excellent Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (reviewed on September 1st, 2016) and Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History (reviewed on October 13th, 2016), along with the execrable The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (reviewed on September 19th, 2016) – I decided that two out of three ain’t bad, and so I bought Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country; I mean, after all, Danubia and Germania were both sprawling travelogues-cum-histories and were great, whereas The Man Who Saved Britain was just a 300+ page screed against his own country (with precious little good to say about its ostensible subject, to boot), so I figured that Lotharingia would follow the path of the former two and not the latter one. That is, I hoped that would be the case.

Happily, it was. Lotharingia follows in the footsteps of Danubia and Germania in being a chatty, informal look-around for a nation that’s no longer there. Imagine Winder teaching a class, not standing at a lectern droning on about who-knows-what, but rather sitting in a leather wingback chair with a few students around him, everyone partaking in tea and crumpets before a roaring fire with dusty tomes all about, just shooting the breeze and going wherever the conversation takes you. THAT’s what these three books are like: delightful, informative and amusing reads. The sweep of Winder’s knowledge of the area and history is breathtaking, while his wit, acuity and sense of irony are all insightful and amusing. Never afraid to call a spade a shovel in his judgements, his take on various subjects to straightforward, like when he says that the Spanish armada was an ill-planned expenditure having no chance of success while noting that Phillip II saw it “as God’s will rather than just a stupid idea”.

While the lost Kingdom of Lotharingia is the main focus of Lotharingia, its over-mighty neighbors can’t help but crowd in on the story: the Holy Roman Empire and the plethora of successor German states; the ever-glowering Kingdom of France; the Duchy of Burgundy (ultimate successor to Lotharingia) and it’s international game of playing off England against France; the Untied Provinces and their epic struggle against Spain; Winder acts as if he is trying to assemble a continent-wide jigsaw using only a fuzzy photograph of the finished product as reference. This is partly due to the fact that chronology and Winder don’t seem to be on speaking terms, which can be confusing (if not infuriating) if you’re not familiar with European history. Thus, we get a listing of museum contents, descriptions of churches, a portrait of Hildegard of Bingen, a section on the Crusades, not to mention notes on the places he has visited and the food that he ate…all seemingly at random. Indeed, Lotharingia the book resembles Lotharingia the country, what with its apparent randomness and hodgepodge organization.

An entertaining and informative look at a long-lost country that, somehow in Winder’s telling, is with us still. So glad kept the voice he found with Danubia and Germania.

“The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan”, by Steven Gaines

288 pages, Little, Brown and Company, ISBN-13: 978-0316608510

I wonder who Betty Spero was and why she gave this gift from Steve away. It’s right there on the inner page, written in permanent ink, for anyone to see: “For Betty Spero – Best Wishes – Steve”. Perhaps Betty wasn’t a fan of author Steven Gaines? Maybe this book in particular, The Sky’s the Limit: Passion and Property in Manhattan didn’t interest her? (I have to admit: if I didn’t get this thing for a mere $1 from Barnes & Noble on Rochester Road, I doubt that I would have bought it myself; I mean, a book for a buck? How could I go wrong?).

But there is no question that The Sky’s the Limit is intended for a niche market: namely, anyone who wants to know the ins-and-outs of celebrities buying seven and eight figure properties in Manhattan and all the machinations involved in finding the most prestigious property or the swankest address or, hell, just to get past the damn co-op boards. But there is more to this book than just this light gossipy stuff: for instance, there is some genuinely useful factual information, as when Gaines provides the history of a number of historic buildings in Manhattan, going so far as two devote not one, but two, chapters to The Ansonia. It turns out that many of these grand old buildings were transformed from hotels into co-ops which, ironically enough, started out as a socialist-inspired movement for dirt-poor tenants to buy and own their own buildings, but which has transformed into the ultimate exclusive club for the very rich. To counter this trend, high-end condos, which do not have the strict cliquish boards like co-ops do, began their rise to the top of the oh-so-exclusive Manhattan real estate market at the expense of co-ops. Hey, if you can’t join ‘em, beat ‘em, I say.

Gaines’ does his yeoman work in attempting to make these crass self-promoting real estate brokers and vapid too-rich socialites anyone outside of Manhattan has never heard of into real-life characters, but they’re all really just bland human beings who have nothing to recommend them but money. The (rather abrupt) end of the book discusses the recent opening of the Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle with its many very high-end condos, and Gaines illustrates some recent trends in his discussion of the multi-million dollar condos there, such as the recent resurgence of condos over co-ops, and the movement of some of the very high-end real estate off of Park and Fifth Avenues to the West Side, or even further downtown, to SoHo. But I think an extra chapter with Gaines’ final thoughts about the future of high-end real estate in Manhattan would have been quite interesting indeed; given these recent trends that he cites, I would have liked to have read about what he thinks the future holds for Manhattan luxury real estate.

But for all that, I liked The Sky’s the Limit and it’s exposing of the Manhattan luxury real estate market: the hoity-toity book called the “Social Register” dictating who can live where; the various co-op boards in luxury buildings that often require a buyer to have at least 20 times (!) in assets over the asking price of the apartment; and the cost of an apartment rarely holding any relationship to the true value of the space. Indeed, Manhattan real estate is a cutthroat, baffling (but thrilling) world, and Gaines takes readers on a spectacular ride through it. Real estate done by the social register, Gaines implies, may be a thing of the past. His last chapter focuses on a new breed of Manhattan brokers, those who are solely interested in racking up sales. A gossipy, entertaining peek into a glam world you and I have no hope in joining. Oh well.

“Farewell in Splendor: The Passing of Queen Victoria and Her Age”, by Jerrold M. Packard

304 pages, Dutton Adult, ISBN-13: 978-0525937302

Let’s face it: NOBODY could mourn like the Victorians. With their reams of rules, their exacting expectations and their seemingly morbid curiosity over just what happened to our earthly shells when we at last shuffled off this mortal coil set the standard for bereavement from their day to ours. And when it came to the woman who gave her name to this epoch, the British People pulled out all the stops to say their final farewells to this simultaneously remarkable and yet very average woman – of course, they had a mighty hard act to follow; after all, when Prince Albert, her husband of just over twenty years died in 1861, Victoria spent the rest of her life – all 40 years! – mourning her beloved Prince. Jerrold M. Packard sets all this out in Farewell in Splendor: The Passing of Queen Victoria and Her Age, a day-by-day chronology of the last week in the life of Queen Victoria and her funeral. Naturally, when a woman has nine children and forty grandchildren, it is easy to see that there is bound to be confusion and differences of opinion about her care and final wishes; however, when that woman is also related to almost every royal house in Europe…well then, just try and referee between these immense egos and see how far you get.

Farewell in Splendor begins on January 14th, 1901 (the first day in anyone’s memory that Victoria stayed in bed at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight) and concludes on February 4th, 1901 when she was laid to rest in the Royal Mausoleum within the Frogmore Estate at Windsor, where her beloved Albert’s remains awaited her. While the Queen’s life, death and burial are of course at the forefront of Packard’s book, he also manages to fill in the gaps of the narrative with brief segues into the history of the Royal Family: all of the distinct personalities, quirks, failings and agendas of this vast brood of international and intermarried royals are put on full display, for better or for worse. Especially telling is the behavior of her son and heir, Albert Edward (“Bertie” for short), who decided to buck his death mother’s fervent wish that he would become the first King Albert and instead became King Edward VII; and her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II (“Willie” to the family), who took this opportunity to NOT be the bombastic showoff he normally was and, instead, behave like a grieving family member. It would appear that both of these very different men saw this moment as a chance to grow up at last (would that it had lasted).

Don’t be put off by the subject matter: I, for one, don’t dig reading about death and funerals and grieving and wailing, but Farewell in Splendor is so much more than all of that. It is a rare glimpse into a world unknown to most of us, of how a very different class of people during a very different age marked the passing of one of their own. For that, any future anthropologist worth his salt can use this slim volume as a telescope into the long-lost Victorian Era.

“The ‘Hitler Myth’: Image and Reality in the Third Reich”, by Ian Kershaw

320 pages, Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0192802064

Oh, look: another book about Hitler…an academic book, no less. Y’all know what that means: lots of detail; lots of verbiage; and, oh yes, lots of redundancy. Ian Kershaw is perhaps the modern-day expert on Hitler and the Nazis. His two-volume biography on the son-of-a-bitch is perhaps the standard on Hitler bios in the English language (those would be Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris, reviewed by me on March 5th, 2014, and Hitler 1936-1945: Nemesis, reviewed by me on March 6th, 2014; although I, for one, think that Hitler by Joachim C. Fest – reviewed by me on March 30th, 2017 – was far superior). But one thing that Kershaw brings to any of his Nazi investigatory ways is a certain frame of reference that affects both the material he includes and excludes, and the conclusions that he presents, i.e. an apparent requirement that every action by Hitler must have a known reason – I mean, Kershaw would lead you to believe that we (or at least he) knows why Hitler did most everything he did. So for example, once becoming Chancellor in 1933, Kershaw says that Hitler wanted to do nothing, just like he did in his wastrel Vienna years earlier as a starving artist, and so he just watched movies, chatted with his friends, had long meals and teas, and so on; to summarize the author’s position, all the bad stuff was done by his staff. Bad stuff that does come up at Hitler’s hand – like, oh I don’t know, the Night of the Long Knives – is made to appear almost a necessity so as to maintain order and forestall a disaster.

No mention that it was at this pre-territorial-grabbing time that Hitler took Guderian’s suggestion and created the wholly self-sufficient mobile armored units over the strong objections of the Army; nor is there mention that while the Nazis were out of power they has formed a kind of “shadow cabinet”, ready to take over if the government in power should fall – political institutions, educational institutions, churches, labor unions, etc. – thus, when Hitler took power, they were able to almost instantly take control of every part of German society. And no mention that, based on his WWI experience, Hitler demanded that Germany focus on building only offensive weapons, but also no mention of him stunning von Braun and his rocket scientists by telling them why their V-2 superweapon would not work, or telling the Army how to take Fort Eben-Emael when they were stumped. Or when Kershaw claims with certainty that Hitler invaded the USSR because he wanted to force Britain to negotiate a peace treaty; I think the consensus is that the USSR invasion was a piece of Hitler’s Mein Kampf/Lebensraum core belief structure, and that having Britain cave in was just fluff tossed out by Ribbentrop that would have been a welcome side benefit to Hitler, but not a prime cause. The author gives Hitler a “logical” reason for invading the USSR rather than an ideological one.

The point is, this is not the track record of an uninvolved, idle, tea-with-Der-Führer personality, and the carrot that keeps any totalitarian state together is a belief in the god-like set of miracles that the leader of the state – and only the leader – has brought and will continue to bring; the stick is the terror, the almost incapacitating fear that any perceived inappropriate action on your part will be informed upon by your neighbor, workmate, patron at an event, or your own child, and you and maybe your family will be whisked off to the concentration camp, possibly never to return. To read this book, few of these carrots, none of the sticks, or the totalitarian state itself, existed under Hitler.

“God Emperor of Dune”, by Frank Herbert

423 pages, Berkley Books, ISBN-13: 978-0425072721

Well, now, get this: whereas the first three Dune books – y’know, Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune – were a trilogy, set within several years of one another, God Emperor of Dune takes place 3500 years after the previous books and focuses squarely on Leto II as he follows his Golden Path, in which peace is kept through the universe and human beings are kept on a short leash. Oh, and he’s transformed into a sandworm with a human head. Yeah. Um…yeah. If Paul was the Julius Caesar of the future, then his son Leto is Augustus, who has established his own version of a Pax Romana – a universal Pax Letona? – creating a galactic government that has remained in power over three millennia through the absolute control of the Spice and the restricting of human movement. And, let’s not forget, that Leto can see into the future, so there’s no sneaking up on him, you can bet. The price of this peace is obvious: civilization has stagnated and many of the same institutions are still around, despite a distance in time that the typical person would find staggering.

This is an incredibly vivid book with superb characterizations, as you really feel that you know Leto II by the end, feeling the pain of his supreme loneliness, the boredom which provokes his wry, sometimes vicious sense of humor and the essential nobility which causes him to sacrifice his humanity to save the human race. With that said, the writing is at times cryptic and we are left pondering what Leto II means in his rantings. Does he create a galactic paradise to make humans understand the pitfalls of complacency? Is he saying that chaos is necessary for our survival? Is it possible that his Golden Path is an exercise to prepare humanity for what is to come, how to prepare for it and, more importantly, how to overcome the threat and evolve? What is the threat? We are cast allusions that very soon, spice will no longer be needed for interstellar space travel, thus breaking the Spacing Guild’s monopoly. It all points to the end of his empire of which he has always been aware. What has become of humanity after so many years of the Spice’s influence? How has humanity evolved? The crux of his Golden Path is not he himself, but what arises from his death and years of tyrannical control. All of this is deep stuff, and I, for one, couldn’t help but feel that I had learned something by the end – although just what it was I had no idea.