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The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s

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After the Civil War and Reconstruction, America was witnessing revolutions in every field. Not only in industry were there innovations, but in politics, economy, and society as well. These changes, including the emergence of multi-millionaires like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, labor unions, and the fight for free silver, continued well into the final decade of the 19th century. The 1890's was a time of unrest in America with corrupt politicians, an agrarian downturn, and other problems. H.W. Brands tries to get a hold of this turbulent age in The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890's.

Brands' objective in this work is to illustrate the rich history of the "reckless decade," while at the same time drawing parallels to the modern day. His introduction serves as a reminder of this goal. In it, he compares the end of the 19th century to the end of the 20th century. Both periods felt the "brink of a new era... most pronounced in America's cities." The cities in both eras helped reshape the economy. Brands notes that the politics of both decades were entrenched in fear and weariness. Those of the 1890's feared the change of the lives of the farmers with industrialization, while those of the 1990's feared a "ubiquitous, iniquitous liberalism." These comparisons are offered in the introduction, but not given directly in the book.

Brands covers a startlingly broad selection of events in such a narrow timeframe of history. The competition between the business juggernauts, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan is presented in almost a narrative form, making a mundane matter of economics interesting. Brands spends a chapter discusses the "other half" of society, in distinct contrast with the aforementioned business magnates. He alludes to the work of journalist, Jacob Riis, in how immigrants managed to get by in the slums of New York. Much of the chapter is taken directly from Riis' gloomy portrayal of the ramshackle apartments. Brands discusses in depth the Spanish-American War, Jim Crow laws and segregation, and the national frenzy over gold and silver. One of the more interesting parts of the book was a retelling of the Homestead Strike of 1892. Brands depicts the event as having "the atmosphere a circus. (The better educated of the Pinkertons might have thought of a Roman circus with themselves as Christians and the strikers as the lions.)" The scope of the book misses very little: educational reform may be the only theme untouched in The Reckless Decade.

The book is written in a very approachable style. Brands is, at times, captivating in his narration of events. Unfortunately, the reading is also slow at some points. The author should be applauded, however, for his extensive research, as the material is exhaustive. The Reckless Decade encapsulates ten years of history in a mere 350 pages.

H.W. Brands is one of our best popular historians, and he doesn't disappoint with this book about America in the 1890's. He starts the book with two tales that demonstrate the closing of the frontier- the final major land rush in the Oklahoma Territory, which occurred in 1893; and the fighting at Wounded Knee, in the Dakota Territory, in December 1890, which resulted in the deaths of Sitting Bull and many women and children (noncombatants) at the hands of U.S. Army cavalry troops. The Sioux Indians were left demoralized by this event. Professor Brands grabs our attention with the first sentence of the book: "Fred Sutton had watched the earlier rushes into Oklahoma; he had seen friends no smarter, tougher, or more discerning than himself grab homesteads; and when word came that the government in Washington was going to open up the Cherokee Strip to settlement, he determined that this time he'd get a piece of the action." Later on in the chapter, the author switches from the concrete to the philosophical, telling us what thinkers such as Frederick Jackson Turner and Henry and Brooks Adams had to say about the significance of the closing of the frontier. This balance, in addition to the gripping narrative style, is what makes Professor Brands such a good writer. The book is just plain fun to read, but it is also intellectually challenging. Later chapters deal with the growth and centralization of big business (Carnegie and Rockefeller); the importance of the financier (J.P. Morgan); the urban, immigrant poor and the role of the political machines (Tammany Hall); economic downturn and the plight of farmers; racial discrimination and the different philosophies of Black American leaders on how to improve the lives of Black Americans (Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois); the political battle over the Gold Standard vs. bimetallism (the Populist party, William Jennings Bryan); and the exercise of American power abroad (the Spanish-American War and Theodore Roosevelt). Professor Brands wrote this book in the mid-1990's and he points out some parallels between the two decades- the most obvious being the tendency of people to begin looking outside the political mainstream during periods of great economic uncertainty. During the 1890's people felt under stress from industrialization, economic centralization and also from the severe depression the country was going through. Americans in the 1990's felt the heat of global competition and the uncertainties involved in the ongoing transition from a manufacturing to a more service based economy. The author gently points out some similarities. He wisely doesn't take the analogy too far. As you can see, the book is brimming over with topics and ideas, but it is always a joy to read- not least because of the many fascinating characters who are portrayed. In the section on the rise of big business, Professor Brands entertains us with the story of the competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse. Westinghouse originally made his fortune by inventing the railway air brake. When he decided to branch out into electricity, Edison wasn't amused. He muttered to a colleague, "Tell Westinghouse to stick to air brakes." Edison was working on commercializing direct current, while Westinghouse favored alternating current (which uses higher voltages). To try to influence public opinion, Edison had his technicians wire up stray cats and dogs to the higher voltages and switched on the current. Edison put out pamphlets implying that alternating current would do the same thing to people that it did to the unfortunate animals. And when Westinghouse got the contract to provide the electricity for New York State's "electric chairs," Edison remarked that prisoners could now either be hanged or they could be "Westinghoused." So, apparently "The Wizard Of Menlo Park" didn't spend all of his time inventing. He had a few moments left over to engage in some below-the-belt boxing!

"The Reckless Decade" is a very readable synthesis of biography, social history, intellectual history, and just good old-fashioned storytelling art. Brands's writing style is electric, his wit sharp, and his discretion as to when to use well-chosen quotations and when to render his own pithy judgments seldom erring.

A thoroughly enjoyable period history of a time very much like our own.

I'm a novelist who does a lot of research. I needed information about the 1890s in the US. This book totally delivered. The book was thorough and dramatic and interesting.

One way to tie together the disparate topics in this book is to group them under a single decade, the 1890s. The topics are interesting, and probably underreported in classroom learning - which is why I wanted to read it.

There's the frontier, discussed by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier paper, and amended, by Brands, with other thoughts from the great-grandsons of John Adams, our second president. There are the titans of industry, who are often thought of as monopolists, yet they reduced costs significantly. Their focus on reducing costs is not usually cited as an influence on deflation, but it is one reason why prices were not sticky in the 1890s as they were in the 1930s. This deflation caused serious problems for farmers, who didn't lose their purchasing power, but did have trouble paying back their loans as their income fell.

Thus, frustrated farmers formed associations, although farmers prefered to remain independant, in order to save their livlihood. This brought rise to the Granges, originally a social club, which branched into politics because of common grounds. Soon the united united influence of Granges bred the Populist movement, which brought their political power to bear pressure on the country.

Among the most interesting, and best presented platforms, of the Populist front is their focus on Silver. The Cross of Gold, by William Jennings Bryan, has often been something that I just knew of, but had not known about. Brandt fixed that, by explaining the effects of the precious metals on money supply, which was really the key complaint of debtors.

Segregation, which was validated by the Courts in Plessy versus Ferguson in 1896, and labor strife, as expressed in the Homestead riot of 1892 and the Pullman strike of 1894, were other key events of the 1890s explored in depth by Brandt. And the Populists gave rise to the Progressives, personified by Theodore Roosevelt. All of these topics are featued in depth in this book.

Thus, Brandt offered a highly interesting slice of American history, one that interested me, and hopefully, will interest others.

For me the essence of history is story telling. Irving Stone, Daniel Boorstein in his American trilogy and David McCullough are in my pantheon of great American historical story tellers. So is H. W. Brands. Professor Brands has personalized American history in over a dozen books. One of my favorites is one of his first: The Reckless Decade: America in the 1890s.

Brands bases his scholarship on several hundred books and then concocts a succulent bouillabaisse from the ingredients. The Last Frontier is a fascinating account of how the frontier was closed and why Frederick Jackson Turner was an unlikely, and, initially, scantily recognized, soothsayer of this event. In Morgan We Trust is a vibrant account of the `robber barons' that highlights the highhandedness of this era. How the Other Half Lived, from Jacob Riis, Tammany, and Jane Addams, puts faces on the poverty that affected so many people during the Gilded Age. Blood on the Water, in recounting, Homestead, Pullman, and the railroad confrontations, portrays labor's fights against the immutable power of capitalists and the federal government, and the Supreme Court.

The Matter With Kansas vividly portrays the struggle between `Wall Street' and the farmers and Populists in the West. Plessy V. Crow is a perceptive insight into 19th century racism, with a question as to whether Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois had the better short-term approach. Cross of Gold, Tongue of Silver provides a sympathetic account of how William Jennings Bryan's `cross of gold' would be smashed by Mark Hanna and the eastern establishment. Democratic Imperialism captures the essence of how an `American empire' stumbled ahead through Hawaii and 'a splendid little war,' before the Filipino imbroglio.

Each of these vignettes provides a gut-wrenching appreciation of the struggles, greed, and arrogance of these formative events. In a marvelous epilogue, Professor Brands, writing in the mid-1990s, relates these events to contemporary America. His conclusion is worth repeating:

"A hundred years later, as Americans approach the end of another century, a single verdict on the 1890s' debate between the declinists and the triumphalists remains as problematic as ever. That it does so--that a century of evidence leaves the issue still in doubt--ought to recommend modesty to latter-day debaters on the same subject. Odds are that their debate will be unresolved another century hence. A reader of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire once asked the author for a judgment on Rome's lasting significance. Gibbon replied that it was too soon to tell. Observers of American history--whether that of the 1890s or the 1980s--could do worse than to recall Gibbon." Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome?--The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America and Anatol Lieven's America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism continue this dialogue.

I introduced my students to the Gilded Age in 2009 with:

"Something to THINK About

An era in which:
* The courts and the federal administration gave corporations a free hand to do almost anything they wished;
* Banks, through ineptness, greed, and criminal actions, came close to destroying the U. S. financial system;
* Bribery at the federal, state, and local level was so prevalent that it seemed difficult to find an honest politician;
* The federal and state administration, as well as Congress and the Supreme Court, showed scant respect for the rights (and, often, lives) of the common people;
* Some of the largest businesses engaged in massive fraud and deception that continued for years without any significant government intervention;
* Some of the new rich became rich beyond one's wildest imagination--a few achieved this with `relatively clean hands;' others bought politicians and others as if they were commodities in the market place.
* The economy spiraled into a free fall with a number of experts forecasting a prolonged economic depression.
* Wars, that were casually started, soon resulted in a quagmire.

This could be written about 2009. In fact, I am summarizing much of the content of our chapter on the U. S. economy 1870-1900. Two positive differences: in the early 21st century federal and state troops did not intervene in strikes and shoot to kill or wound strikers and the Supreme Court did not uphold such actions."

The Restless Decade of H.W. Brands is a book that lives up to its name. Brands takes his readers for a trip although out America in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Brands presents a nation that is on the edge, with the end of century that began with President John Adams and finished with William McKinley; saw the nation grow from the Appalachian Mountains to the Pacific Ocean; split in half and fight; and the saw the end of slavery and the beginning of Jim Crow, the American people were unsure of where they were going. The American frontier was closing and the people were unsure of where in the world they as people belonged and what their national destiny was.

The book begins in what is had been the traditional American story which, in our history, was all too familiar. It was the story of settlers trying to stake their claim to the west by going out and trying to settle a plot of land. But this time honored tradition was coming to a rapid close and the way it was closing was odd. In the past, the government did not hand out land based on organized land races but that was how the frontier was closing in Oklahoma.

Another sign that the frontier had seen its last was the end of armed organized Indian resistance. The Massacre at Wounded Knee, which the events surrounding are very elegantly explained making it easy for the reader to understand the tragic end to the last ounce of Indian resistance and the mysterious ghost dance, ends a long bloody chapter of history dating back to the fifteenth century. With the closing of the frontier and the end of Indian resistance things were changing at a rapid pace.

Brands makes his readers familiar with Frederick Jackson Turner, an academic who grew up on the frontier and who saw its closing as an inevitable disaster for the country. To Turner, the frontier is what had protected the Americans from the corruptions of monarchical Europe. With the frontier disappearing American democracy was going to be headed in a not-so-pleasant direction.

"The frontier had been the fountainhead of American democracy, Turner declared. With each stage in the march of settlement westward, Americans had been required to reinvent government, and this continual reinvention precluded the congealing of a political system in which power begot privilege and privilege monopolized power. 'The peculiarity of American institutions is the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people, to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress, out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier, the complexity of city life.' Where land was abundant and cheap, no one needed to kowtow to land lords or employers. Economic independence begot political independence; democracy was the child of the frontier, the natural consequence of free land." (p.23)

Brands does not stop at the vanishing frontier. He discusses the great industries that were rising up in this time period: oil, transportation, and steel. Brands describes the great industrialists that created these industries. These men were Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan. Although they could be ruthless in their business dealings they were not all bad. Not only did they employ a great many people, but they also were very charitable with their wealth giving mass sums of money for good causes. It is interesting now in modern times where we have the government bailing out big business, back then J.P. Morgan single handily bailed out the Federal government saving it from default.

However, the Industrial Age also produced cities that were a living hell for the inhabitants. Brands quotes from the journalist Jacob Riis who wrote about the condition for the poor and the destitute who were struggling to survive. In addition, the conditions of the cities powered the fuel of the political machines, some of whom had been around since the beginning of the nineteenth century or earlier. The most famous was Tammany Hall, founded by Aaron Burr in end of the previous century. In 1890s, Tammany milked the spoils system to feed itself power, but that was not all, it also provided a huge social need for a great deal of the oppressed.

"'Politics are impossible without the spoils,' Croker answered. 'It is all very well to argue that it ought not to be so. But we have to deal with men as they are and with things as they are. Consider the problem which every democratic system has to solve. Government, we say, of the people, by the people, and for the people. The aim is to interest as many of the citizens as possible in the work--which is not an easy work, and had many difficulties and disappointments--of governing the state or the city. Of course, in an ideal world every citizen would be so dominated by patriotic or civic motives that from sheers unselfish love of his fellow men he would speed nights and days in laboring for their good. If you lived in such a world inhabited by such men, I admit there could be no question but that we could and would dispense with the spoils system. But where is that world to be found? Certainly not in the United States, and most certainly not in New York.'" (p.108)

The Industrial Age created a new idea of employment and unemployment, now with most people working for wages the ability to survive on such wages and the conditions in which they had to work became major issues. Also since the interests large corporations were now very distant from their employees and moved with profits primarily in mind, workers' unions were necessary to get attention to their plight and gain the power to negotiate. Brands talks about both these power struggles and the rise of Eugene Debs.

"Arrests of other A.R.U. Leaders followed, making a continuation of the strike almost impossible. By its liberal--or rather, reactionary--use of the injunction, the government had rendered illegal many acts that formerly had been accepted part of the give and take of labor management relations. Simply by advocating that workers leave their jobs, union officials found themselves liable to criminal prosecution. Some unionist complained that it would have been more straightforward to outlaw strikes altogether--but that would have required approval of Congress, which despite the conservatism in the air wasn't willing to go quite so far. The Cleveland administrations approach had the advantage for conservatives of not requiring the assent of the people's representatives."(p.156)

Race relations took a turn for the worst in this period. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877 rights that African Americans had gained had been steadily chipped away. If the Supreme Court had done its duty when confronted with the problem in Plessy v. Ferguson things could have turned for the better. They did not and the mass injustice of this decision was elegantly stated in Justice Harlan's dissent* in which every word of it came true.

"Although Justice Brown spoke for the court, he didn't speak for all the justices. Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan vehemently disapproved of the court's decision and delivered a blistering rebuke to the majority in a vigorously phrased dissent. Where Brown had contended that the slavery issue was not germane to the Plessy case, Harlan declared that slavery was absolutely germane. The Thirteenth Amendment he said, 'not only struck down the institution of slavery as previously existing in the United States, but prevents the imposition of any burdens or disabilities that constitute badges of slavery or servitude.' To strengthen the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress and the people of the states had approved the Fourteenth Amendment; together, the two amendments 'removed the race line from our governmental systems.' Quoting an earlier decision involving the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, Harlan explained that the Supreme Court declared 'that the law in the States shall be the same for the black as for the white; that all persons, whether colored or white, shall stand equal before the law of the States, and, in regard to the colored race, for whose protection the amendment was primarily designed, that no discrimination shall be made against them by law because of their color.'" (p.230)

In the African-American community two men competed in the market place of ideas for solutions to the problems facing black men and women for simply being black men and women. One was Booker T. Washington, a former slave, and was W.E.B. Du Bois, an African American intellectual.

"The difference between the two men consisted chiefly in emphasis. For Washington, the training of the masses took priority. Like an army general gathering his infantry for attack, Washington intended to overwhelm the fortifications of the Jim Crow system by an assault across a broad front. For Du Bois, the education of the elite demanded initial attention. 'To attempt to establish any sort of system of common and industrial school training,' he said, 'without first (and I say first advisedly)--without first providing the higher training of the very best teachers, is simply throwing your money to the winds.' Du Bois envisioned the assault on the racial status quo as being spearheaded by commando units of the talented tenth. The commandos would breach the segregationist front by the force of their intelligent gifts of leadership, and they would thereby open the way for the rank and file to follow." (p.250)

Also the election of 1896 was a transformative election that would preview how elections were going to be run in the coming century. The issue of the day was money, and whether to have a gold standard or allow for duel metals with silver coined as well. Brands introduces William Harvey and his alter ego 'Coin' who rallies the populists with the cry of free silver leading to the eventual nomination of William Jennings Bryan. However, popular Bryan may have been, he was to lose to William McKinley, whose agent Mark Hanna was going to redefine the political landscape.

"At the same time, Hanna enlarged the scale of operations of the political manager. In much the same way that the great industrialists secured their markets and broadened their supply bases by expanding into adjacent regions and eventually across the country, so did Hanna. Even as he guided McKinley to election in Ohio, Hanna traveled neighboring states with a message that if Ohio fell to the forces of radicalism, Pennsylvania and Illinois and other states might fall too. In this fashion he forged a network that eventually spanned that nation. The network united, in a more orderly and effective way than before, the financial resources of American big business with the political resources of the Republican Party. It came together in the 1890s partly because of the same kinds of economies of scale and other centralization forces that produced corporate consolidation under Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, but equally because of the decentralizing forces that were producing the Populist revolt, the great labor strikes of the decade, and the outcry for free silver. The industrial lords and their political allies felt the need to band together against the anarchic tendencies they saw abroad in the land. To achieve their vision of America's future, they had to beat down the forces that wanted to take America's future, they had to beat down the forces that wanted to take America backward into a mythical past."(p.266)

The world changed at an incredibly faced pace in the 1890s, H.W. Brands smooth narrative guides the reader on a journey to a world that is both very familiar at times and others unrecognizable. It is a book I highly recommend. The only real complaint I have is no visuals (photos, political cartoons, political election maps) which I think would have led to a richer experience.

*It is ironic that it was a former slaveholder who had the only sense of justice on that court.

This reads as a graduate paper. I forced myself through it because there is information in the text. It is too detailed for a summary read, while not deep enough for an exhaustive study. I was disappointed because some of the author's subsequent books are great.