Customer Reviews

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (American History)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (American History)
In 1981 the young historian Jackson Lears impressed many with his publication of No Place of Grace, an interpretation of the antimodern strain in American thought and culture between 1880 and 1920. Lears neatly argued how the quest for intense experience, although seemingly just a back-channel reaction against the mainstream of modernism, carved the way for the transformation of nineteenth-century Protestant self-denial into the twentieth-century secular ideal of self-fulfillment.

In 2009 Lears, now at the apex of his career, takes on the same era with his broad overview of American politics and culture, Rebirth of a Nation. It is the work of a mature scholar, sufficiently accomplished to play on the same field with the most eminent historians of this segment of the American past, with Hofstadter, Wiebe, Lasch, Trachtenberg, and many others dutifully acknowledged in a very helpful set of bibliographical notes.

A major contribution of this volume is Lears' demonstration of the bonds between the narratives of personal and national regeneration in this period. The self-shaping aspirations of individuals influenced the currents of national politics, he proposes, and in turn public policies were often aimed at personal redemption. Longings for renewal formed by evangelical traditions melded into several "isms" that characterized the era: moralism, militarism, and Progressivism chief among them.

The connections were most obvious in the moralist "purity crusades," such as those against alcohol and gambling. But the linkage was also evident in the government's Native American and foreign policy, which gave scope to the male fantasy of revitalization through military action -- war was seen as wholesome by many. And the belief that social circumstances influenced individuals' fates lay at the core of Progressivism, with the corollary belief that social purification could breed personal purification.

Lears believes that future government policies were still up for grabs in the 1890s. He points out that reformers used the language of personal and social transformation, that "They wanted to use government to change people's behavior in unprecedented ways: to end class conflict, to control big business, to segregate society, to sober it up." He stresses the "producerism" of that period, which attempted to unite farmers and workers as the true representatives of "manly" ideals of economic independence, set against their common enemies in finance and business.

Wealthy Americans defended their privileges by cooperating with reformers on some things, Lears observes. For instance, many prominent business leaders supported the agenda of self-renewal and imperial expansion. Lears claims that Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan, in particular, "helped to transform a plutocracy into a socially conscious elite." He notes a re-orientation of ruling class values from moralism to meritocracy and a shift from chaotic laissez-faire capitalism to corporate, managerial capitalism.

After 1900 workers made some headway; wages increased and working hours decreased, on average. But, according to Lears, the application of scientific management "guaranteed that the work itself would be tedious, demanding, and frequently mindless," with workers themselves losing control over the pace and process of their work. He sees "a new dialectic of work and play," where tedium at work could be compensated by amusement purchased off the job.

The foundations were forming for a consumption-driven culture. Lears writes of the equation of markets with progress, of how consumer demand was seen as the engine of human improvement. "Regeneration through purchase," he claims, was "the fantasy at the heart of the embryonic consumer culture."

Mass consumption was underwritten by imperialism, in Lears' view. He asserts that "... the aims of American empire were the same as those of European empire -- free access to foreign markets, raw materials, and investment opportunities, all in the name of a civilizing mission that (it was alleged) would bring regeneration to the colonizer and the colonized alike."

Woodrow Wilson's eventual decision to enter World War I reflected Progressivism at its most ambitious point, Lears suggests, with the world, not just the nation, as the target for renewal. For Lears, the rejection of the League of Nations treaty by the Senate represented the end of the age of regeneration.

Lears concludes that the taming of capitalism was the most desirable outcome of the popular longings for renewal, whereas one bad outcome was enforced conformity (most notably, Prohibition). In his judgment, "reform was at its most humane when empowering the previously powerless -- women, workers, children -- rather than enforcing majority values." Even though policies originating with populism were watered down through compromises with the corporate hierarchy, he believes, the Progressives "created the foundation for an American version of the welfare state."

Lears does a masterful job of integrating these and many other sub-themes which support his motif of rebirth. He provides solid insights on racism, the roles of women, vitalism and the reaction against positivism, and the ethic of peak performance, for example. Rich discussions of the lives, thought, actions, and impact of dozens of key figures are embedded in the very readable narrative. Readers may disagree with some of his emphases, judgments, and interpretations, but his reasoning is always clear.

This very incisive, though often quite critical, book examines some of the major cultural currents in American society from the end of Reconstruction through WWI. It is the prevailing thinking and psychology of the period that most concerns the author. The book is not intended to be a detailed history of the era, but the author does examine such issues and developments as race, immigration, the degradation of labor, the rise of huge corporations, economic instability, consumerism, populism, progressivism, imperialism, militarism, etc, as well as reinvention of the self.

There is little doubt that the nation was in need of "regeneration" after the horrors of the Civil War. But that renewal was accomplished at the expense of those who were brutally affected by the Southern plantation system. The War was recast as an arena for heroic Anglo-Saxons, now united in their bravery regardless of which side they were on. By the last decade of the century, emancipation had given way to Jim Crow and, even worse, widespread lynching of those who did not kowtow. This spread of racism, heroism, and militarism dominated the ensuing decades. The author describes at length a national obsession among the upper classes of asserting and proving manliness. What better way to show superiority than to subject the brown peoples of the world to Yankee imperialism backed by the military? Theodore Roosevelt, in the author's eyes, is the epitome of such thinking and actions. The author scarcely hides his disdain for the obsession of elites with individual adventure and even bodybuilding.

Of course, a huge development in post-Civil War America was the rise of enormous corporations and their huge impact on workers and the broader culture. The Farmers' Alliance, the Populists, the Knights of Labor, the AFL, and the Socialists were all organizations that sought to counter corporate control of the economy and the degradation of work via mechanization and scientific management. They extolled the virtues of "producers" and sought to establish some form of cooperative commonwealth. Perhaps most important to them was democratic control of the financial system of the US. The chaos of economic cycles and principles of "hard" money always disproportionately affected workers and farmers.

Part of the rebirth of the nation can be looked at as attempts for purification. That took many forms: racial purity, assertion of manliness versus effeteness, and abstinence from alcohol. The Progressive movement can be seen as an effort of elites and experts to purify the economy: child labor laws, anti-trust legislation, reform of the banking system, and the like. As the author notes, their efforts were heavily compromised. Enhanced managerialism was emphasized over fundamental economic restructuring desired by populist groups and administrative regulation was usually adopted over statutory reform, which left corporations and their insiders firmly in charge. Woodrow Wilson succumbed to the impulses of purification and American assertiveness by involving the US in WWI at a great cost in lives with nothing to show for it. Though the author finds that Wilson's ultimate failures mark the end of an era beset by any number of delusions, the New Deal was able to draw upon this era, but without the same zeal and fantasies.

This book is relevant in regards to the making of modern America in several ways. There has been no abatement in the dominance of US corporations, US worldwide economic hegemony, the necessity of the regulatory state, and the driving force of consumerism. Perhaps less appealing is the same tendency to delusional thinking: the reliance on robust militarism and the conceit that the American political and economic systems can be force fed to nations around the world.

The book is definitely far more sobering than the title may suggest. There is not a whole lot of admiration for the grandiose thinking that has been and continues to be a significant part of American culture. While the book is quite interesting, it is not without a certain amount of meandering, vagueness, and unnecessary repetition, but not to the extent that makes the book unreadable or not worthwhile. The book has a superb bibliographical note.

This is a difficult book to judge as it does so many things well and an almost equal number so poorly. The opening summary essay is full of revisionist insight and illuminations, both negative and positive. Negative on figures not quite fully debunked such as Custer and on aristocrats still largely revered such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr and positive on individuals such as Jane Addams and William James. My copy of that part of the book is full of underlinings and exclamation marks. It made me think and tied some things together in a very useful manner.

But Lears too often crosses the line between a reporter of new insights and a fairly demagogic polemicist. The best case of this is his powerfully negative and extraordinarily one-dimensional portrait of Theodore Roosevelt. True enough, the reader familiar with the era feels, TR was consumed with a sadly limited definition of what constitutes manliness and remained largely adolescent in many critical ways. He was certainly not ahead of his times in terms of his written treatment of Native Americans, and on many if not most foreign policy matters he was a war-mongering jingoist right to the end. And, yes, the Spanish American war and his role in it seem ripe and fair subjects for comic ridicule. Good enough so far and a useful counterpoint to the many overly praising and romanticized portrayals of TR offered by authors such as Timothy Egan in "The Big Burn."

But TR was a complex not a simple figure and he was far more progressive, and more effectively progressive, than many of the characters that Lears treats more kindly. Tom Watson is a good example. TR was by no means a soul-mate of JP Morgan, as Lears would have you believe. And his campain for President in 1912 was not primarily about foreign policy; in fact, in 1912 he supported many progressive causes that would only come to fruition in the New Deal.

A fair portait of the man and the era would incude, for example, his remarkable campaign for conservation and the creation of so much protected land for public use. But then such a nuanced view of the time would offer other aristocrats such as Gifford Pinchot their moment in the progressive sun and that Lears would clearly rather not provide.

So the effect of the book is rather uneven and in the end unconvincing. It seems that Lears is carrying more political baggage than an historian should. And the book does not come close to recent monumental histories on individual epochs such as those published by The Oxford History of the United States, especially Gordon Wood's "Empire of Liberty" and Daniel Howe's "What Hath God Wrought."

This era still needs a modern, balanced and comprehensive treatment. This book provides some insight but fails basic tests of fairness and balance.

Jackson Lears "Rebirth of a Nation" is a work of major historical significance that explores an era that is often overlooked in the study of American history. Lears aptly and clearly explains both the unsettled politics and political economy of America between 1877 and 1920. His work explores the rise of monoply capitalism and the response to it by a variety of political movements like the populitsts and reformers of the time in general. In addition, "Rebirth of a Nation" demonstrates the twist Americans put on their imperalist ambitions viz their attempts to differentiate American empire building from European empire building, as well as their simularities as defined by the popular racism of the day.

This is a must read book that is destined to become a standard text for anyone interested in the field. And you can't began to understand the context in which progressivism emerged without taking Lears work into account.

Before I begin the review, it should be noted that Jackson Lears is an excellent historian that has very very thoroughly researched this book. As a writer, however, he is one of the worst. Lears's thesis is that "regeneration" in America during the post Reconstruction period to early World War I was the driving force in imperialism, progressivism, racism, and populism. What he considers "regeneration" is social, moral, and physical and is defined as rebirth. The idea is basic and Lears does not provide a proper framework to discuss the work. Rebirth can be seen as any form of active change throughout history. The concept can be applied to almost anything and Lears work covers too large of a period to be nailed to a simple concept such as "regeneration" or "rebirth".

Despite my problems with his thesis, it is not the flaw of the book. Instead, the largest flaw is that the author is a terrible writer. Being a graduate history student, I have read some fairly dense works on history but Rebirth of a Nation is one of the most boring accounts of the period I have ever read. Lears jumps from topic to topic and his chapters have no central focus. The book is difficult to follow and I found myself having to reread to clarify the authors point. I felt as if I was reading a 350 page academic journal. Near 250 pages, the difficulty in continuing the work became almost unbearable. I began to skim hoping to get the information, but the authors lack of organization in the book made the task impossible. This book is not meant for the lay reader and most likely should be skipped by academics. If you are really curious of the arguments in the book, I suggest reading book reviews which sum the book up fairly well. Any extra information you may gain can be found in much more entertaining books. I suggest reading the book with a critical eye on the thesis. Could the concept of regeneration not work for almost any period: American Revolution(regeneration of British society), Civil War(regeneration of the South), World War II in Germany(regeneration of Germany). The concept can be applied to almost anything because history is understanding gradual shifts and transformations. To say that people have an active role in that is redundant.

I learned a lot about this unique period of America history (post-Civil War through to the start of the Roaring '20s). The author is able to place the period within the context of then and now. I found his analysis of how racism was benign in many ways prior to the Civil War and flourished thereafter thanks to a real political and social shift in the South and the North.

Some chapters do go a little off the rails and your eyes tend to glaze over as the author sets off on some tangent that is not really up your alley. Even so there is so much in here and it's written in a lively conversational way you can't help but get pulled in and feel like you're right there seeing the era unfold around you. It's a pretty impressive writing technique when the author is on his game.

Jackson Lears has a very interesting proposition of trying to portray the tumultuous events that overtook America between the Civil War and World War One. This is one of the most pivotal periods in American history and while Lears tries to tell the story I have to say he comes up short. He does a fine job at times, telling the story of the agrarian uprising at the end of the 19th century and showing how the cult of manhood overtook common sense at the same time.

Also, while I may not necessarily agree with his take on the imposition of Jim Crow I respect the fact that he sees it as a progressive movement and not something done by men in sheets on horses. Jim Crow was law not practice. On the other hand he does overplay how the progressive movement was equality focused in its methods. They were often the worse offenders of racial in-equality and resulted in the worst racial violence.

I also believe short thrift is paid towards innovation. In Lear's view the innovations of the time were inherently dehumanizing and for every Henry Clay Frick, there was a Louis Pasteur who made life better.

All in all a decent book but you should really be a history buff to read.

I have been trying to re-learn the material I had been taught as an undergrad US History almost 40 years ago. The best source is the Oxford series. However, there are volumes yet to be written on the years between the end of the Civil War and 1932. Rebirth of Nation is an ersatz version, readable but not of the quality of the Oxford Series. So if you prefer not to wait until Oxford completes the series, this book will have to do. Readers with more assertiveness than I have should contact Oxford about completing their series.

I read this book as part of an assignment. The author clearly has done extensive research into his subject, however, at times names and concept are tossed in with no reference for the average reader unless they scurry over to wikipedia. The events that lead America to becoming (in the author's opinion) an industrial empire are explored in detail.I found the integration of these events and chapter themes to be intriguing, but this is by no means an entry level history text.

The concept of "regeneration" is constantly mentioned throughout the text but is not supported at times. This work dictates careful reading, not paying attention may lead to puzzlement later. This is a highly opinionated history of the United States which at times I found to be overly dense and slated with a view that seems to delight in finding the wrongs committed by this nation but seldom credits what was done right, as if the world is innocent and only America is the greedy manipulative sinner. I found this stance to be grating making this book an agony for me to complete.

"Rebirth of a Nation" isn't a chronological history that presents the late 19th century as a series of connected events. Nor is it a time travel book designed to present readers with the sights, sounds, smells, ambience and flavor of a time.

Instead it's an interpretative history, a presentation of 19th century America organized according to explanatory themes.

Unfortunately, this interpretative history is terribly trivializing, reducing the diverse thoughts and values and personalities of a populous, far-flung nation to the favorite ideological pigeonholes of 21st century American academe (i.e., racism, imperialism, sexism, militarism, corporatism). 19th century Americans are treated almost as a lower species, mindlessly running around and acting in unreflective devotion to their unchallenged ideologies - instead of being treated as sentient, sophisticated creatures, possessing critical faculties and self-awareness every bit as discerning as the author's.

The unintended irony here is that it's the book that strains to fit all events into these juvenile but fashionable intellectual pigeonholes, thus glossing over the very real diversity of 19th century American society. As a result, the book is littered with wrenchingly horrid quasi-intellectual gobbledygook, as in the following representative sentence:

"The rise of total war between the Civil War and World War I was rooted in longings for release from bourgeois normality into a realm of heroic struggle."

Of course, one needn't read many letters written by Civil War soldiers to appreciate that that war didn't primarily reflect a need for a "release from bourgeois normality." Instead, it was fought in the main by men who saw the terrible American civil war as horrific, dirty but necessary work, who desperately tried to find "bourgeois normality" again as soon as it was over.

So devoted is the text to these ideological themes that much of the content adds up to a sort of incoherence. Exploitation by the robber barons is treated as having only the principal effect of depressing wages, their ostensibly mad rush to increase productivity as having no outcome other than to increase their personal profit. Elsewhere in the book, immigrants are treated as generally chastened by their arrival in racist America, moving on to other places when they can. Virtually any illusion to the inevitable workings of economics is dismissed as "laissez-faire fantasies." These various informational tidbits aren't tied together in a comprehending way.

In the real-world, of course, all of this added up to a brutal but vibrant economic engine - increases in labor productivity had to inevitably translate into more total worker compensation (or, theoretically, shorter hours), which is why the nation attracted immigrants in droves during this time. The balanced story of late 19th century American immigration is not the immigrants who left disgusted with racism, but the large net influx that resulted in a higher percentage of foreign-born Americans than at any previous moment. The methods of American industrialists may indeed have been brutal, but they were also creating jobs for untold millions of people.

Of course, all of the author's favorite themes (racism, militarism, and capitalist exploitation) were present in 19th century America. The fixation on these themes produces an intellectual strait-jacket, allowing for little appreciation of the multi-colored, fascinating history of a turbulent, free-spirited nation, establishing a pre-eminent place among the world's powers.

The title of the book is a clue, in echoing the title of Griffith's racist propaganda film, "Birth of a Nation." If you enjoy feeling superior to previous generations and the "isms" they were all reportedly captive to, this book might work for you. But if you want the full flavor of a complex society, go elsewhere.