FROM BLOODY SHIRT TO FULL DINNER PAIL

A brief though long-overdue and sorely needed overview of American politics from the end of the Civil War through the beginning of the 20th century.

Calhoun (History/East Carolina Univ.; Minority Victory: Gilded Age Politics and the Front Porch Campaign of 1888, 2008, etc.) ably navigates the rough political road that led the United States from the internal machinations of Reconstruction to its rapid territorial expansions into the Caribbean and Pacific at the turn of the 20th century. Along the way, he illuminates the contributions of the key political players, including a litany of American presidents. The author’s inviting prose and steely knowledge of his subject remind us that the political compromises and executive decisions forged during the latter half of the 19th century have come to define the most central tenets of modern American politics. Calhoun's keen profiling of the Democratic and Republican parties of the Gilded Age demonstrates how the parties' core values have since been inverted. The Republican party of Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur and Harrison promoted government intervention and civil rights, ideas generally opposed by the Democratic party of Andrew Johnson and Grover Cleveland. By the time the author arrives at the Republican presidency of William McKinley, however, he has clearly elucidated the shift toward the party alignments as we know them today. If Calhoun's engaging narrative sags slightly at times, it’s not necessarily the author’s fault; debates over specie payments and tariffs are rarely interesting. The author is at his best animating the larger-than-life men who ascended to the presidency, causing us to wonder why we don't know more about someone as politically bipolar as Rutherford B. Hayes or as reform-minded as Chester Arthur.

Though Calhoun misses a couple opportunities to spice things up, as when he glosses over two major political assassinations, his focus on the mainstream politics of the era is lucid and illuminating.