“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.