Book Review: The Republic For Which It Stands

The Republic For Which It Stands:The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896by Richard WhiteOxford University Press, 2017The latest volume in the Oxford History of the United States is The Republic For Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 by Stanford University history professor Richard White, and it covers a thirty-year stretch of American history that White rightly describes as “historical flyover country.” Typically in survey-volumes, “writers and scholars departed the Civil War, taxied through Reconstruction, and embarked on a flight to the twentieth century and the Progressives, while only barely touching down in between.”Fortunately, the entries in the Oxford History are seldom typical. This book, immense and erudite, follows such great series volumes as James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom, Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought, and series editor David Kennedy's Pulitzer-winning Freedom from Fear, and it shares with virtually all of its predecessors a smooth combination of earnest scholarship and inviting, almost conversational tone. White knows perfectly well that his chosen period – muddled in postwar trauma, tsunami-strength political corruption, tariff preoccupation, Indian genocide, and the awkward, adolescent stumblings of a nation beginning to suspect it could be a superpower – isn't the easiest to dramatize, and right at the beginning of the volume's 900 pages, he's confessing these challenges in language that will make all but the most obdurate reader want him to succeed:

Failed presidencies proliferated across the Gilded Age. Critical periods in American history tend to be epitomized by a dominant political figure: Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, the two Roosevelts, Reagan. But the Gilded Age does not induce hagiography. Its presidents come from the Golden Age of Facial Hair, none of them seemingly worth remembering for any substantial achievement. There was no Age of Harrison.

Most of the age in question was given its dubious nickname in the 1873 book by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner called The Gilded Age, a time of some surface glitter covering plenty of darkness and rot. White's book begins at the close of the Civil War and ends with the election of President William McKinley, and in between it has precious little heroism to relate. The United States readers first encounter in these pages is reeling from the military and social cataclysm that had only just ended. The war was over, the slaves were free, the South was in ruins, the President was dead, and the government's political parties were populated with feral, avaricious third-raters almost to a man intent on complacent pillage. The story lines that flow from such beginnings are almost genetically doomed, but White manages even so to find some glimmerings of hope in the muck; against all odds, The Republic For Which It Stands is not a book entirely without heroes. There's crusading Ida B. Wells, “a Victorian mix of rectitude and fierce rebellion against the murderous inequities of the South.” There's William Dean Howells, whose steadying presence can be felt throughout the book. There are public firebrands like the great atheist Robert Ingersoll. There are steady – though acerbic – voices for reason, like that of Henry Adams.And all along, White is patiently providing context and correcting common misconceptions. This kind of authoritative record-setting has always been the most daring and the most thrilling mandate of the Oxford History of the United States; these are books that challenge while they're teaching, and that's always refreshing. White is as careful to note the accomplishments of his scoundrels as he is to point out the moral compromises of his saints, and he assiduously contextualizes some of the cherished folklore of the period:

Americans mythologized the movement of population onto uncultivated lands as quintessentially American. The number of people going into cities, however, far exceeded the pioneers near or beyond the 100^th meridian. The urban immigrants were creating the American future. In 1890 the collective population of Chicago, New York, and Brooklyn exceeded the 2.8 million people who lived in the states and territories lying wholly west of the 100^th meridian, and even then, the Far West was increasingly urban. A quarter of California's population lived in San Francisco in 1890. Subtract San Francisco's population from the West's total, and New York and Brooklyn alone came within a couple hundred thousand people of the population of the Rocky Mountains, Southwest, and Pacific Coast combined.

Harvard University grandee and North American Review presiding genius Charles Eliot Norton titled one of his scathing 1865 essays “The Paradise of Mediocrities,” and that same title could have served without much trouble for this big book (certainly it would have been more accurate than the oddly flag-waving title it ended up with), which brings its narration to a close with America on the brink of changes so fast-moving and dramatic that not even the most far-sighted social observers of the time could have predicted anything like them. Given the incredible pathos and violence lying in wait in the 20^th century, it's perhaps understandable that big, sweeping historical narratives would spend so little time investigating White's “flyover country” – but readers of The Republic For Which It Stands will be very glad of the detour.