Mini-Review: Rebirth of a Nation

If America was baptized by fire during the Civil War, then the decades that came after might be considered the nation’s childhood. Most historians skip over these years. Once the Civil War ends, they seem eager to fast-forward to World War I and the Roaring Twenties. Jackson Lears’ “Rebirth of a Nation” provides one of the few comprehensive looks at this period; that alone makes it worth the read.

“The half-century between the Civil War and World War I was an age of regeneration,” Lears writes. Americans became obsessed with rebirth and revitalization. In part, this was an attempt to repair the devastation wrought by the Civil War. Federals and Confederates made a tacit agreement to forget the war’s dirty details, smothering unpleasant topics like slavery in a fog of patriotic hot air. This was all very well for whites. For blacks, though, it meant the loss of the few civil rights they had earned during Reconstruction.

But behind the longing for rebirth lurked the fear of “overcivilization.” Ministers, intellectuals, and politicians worried that commercial success was turning American muscle into flab. “Overcivilization” explains the bicycling craze that swept America at the turn of the century; the popularity of Teutonic bodybuilder Eugene Sandow; the publication of tracts like William Blaikie’s “How to Get Strong and Stay So.” The conservation movement began, not because Americans suddenly gained an appreciation for nature, but because they sought new ways to keep fit.

Theodore Roosevelt, with his relentless hawking of the “strenuous life,” was a perfect symbol of the times. He also epitomized the dark, virulent undercurrent boiling beneath the obsession with “manliness.” According to Lears, TR, as well as men like Henry Cabot Lodge, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Josiah Strong, preached the purifying power of war. “Overcivilization” could be cured only by cleansing fire. War had other advantages. In an age when evolution had become an intellectual craze, many believed that America had a duty to “uplift” the savages. Senator Albert Beveridge declared that God “has made us master-organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns.”

Yet, if Lears is correct, chaos reigned as much in Manhattan as in Manila. He describes the era’s business climate as “manic-depressive.” Massive booms were followed by sickening dives into depression. It happened in 1877 and 1893; if not for the intervention of millionaire banker J.P. Morgan, it would have happened again in 1907. Workers felt helpless before these jarring swings of the economic pendulum. They sought release in mass entertainment, more available than ever thanks to rising wages and increasing leisure time. Their play had a hysterical edge; it was tinged with a desire for escape, best personified by the immensely popular Harry Houdini.

A few people sought to tame America’s runaway energies, to harness them with the power of government. The Populists came first. Mostly agrarian, with a few urban laborers mixed in, the Populists demanded new antitrust laws, the popular election of senators, and the relatively free printing of money. Though their hopes were dashed by the defeat of their hero, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896 and 1900, the ideas of the Populists eventually flowed into a new reservoir called Progressivism. Some Progressives were as democratic as their Populist forebears; others, however, came to believe that the nation was best operated by a managerial elite, operating under strict business principles.

Lears is at his weakest discussing the politics of the era. Yes, it is easier to sympathize with the Populists and Progressive, but he becomes a cheerleader, whooping them on in their fight against “the white shoe boys on Wall Street.” Everything is reduced to a battle of good guys versus bad guys. Aside from this, however, the book is well worth reading. “Rebirth of a Nation” does as good a job as any book describing the cradle, endlessly rocking, that produced twentieth-century America.