Customer Reviews

The Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law

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While we are in the midst of an apparently profound decline in the fortunes of the working class in America, no book portends so much promise as this one. I, for one, am grateful for the faithfulness with which the conflicts of a century past are rendered. They remain more than pertinent today.

Witt describes the confluence of forces that resulted in a profound reconceptualization of the post-Civil War thinking of how workers are free. Then, liberated from slavery, to be the masters of the own destiny, working people revelled in the idea of their own supposed liberation, free to undertake risks and hazards and endure the consequences of such labor. Nevertheless, this risk-taking was not without consequences, especially to their families and, frankly, to the industries which indulged in shifting those hazards to working people. In what is called the Gilded Age, working families endured horrible consequences of what were, in the end, preventable injuries. We now live in age when those hazards may be revisited. Read this thoughtful essay and you may consider whether we want to revisit that former era.

Witt's book is the best of its kind -- it illuminates the history and legal developments of the turn-of-the-century modern factories and their beleagured workers with stories of the historical players, the thinkers, and the judges and legislators. Witt is accessible to all and I have not stopped thinking about the book and its significance to today's tort laws since.