CRUSADER NATION

The more things change, the more they stay the same: That’s one of many object lessons this engaging look at a go-go, earnest, optimistic period of American history imparts.

Picking up where his 1898: The Birth of the American Centruy (1998) leaves off, Traxel (History/Univ. of the Sciences in Philadelphia) examines two decades in which Americans of every class and description were bent on changing something—their heads, their lives, the world. The bestselling book of the period was Charles Sheldon’s novel In His Steps, a what-would-Jesus-do tract as influential as today’s rapturous eschatological imaginings. Theodore Roosevelt was chasing after errant corporations doing their Enron-like work with rapacious zeal—though, Traxel notes, Roosevelt was quite pro-business and was really trying to stave off more radical solutions to capitalist excess. His Democratic opponent, Woodrow Wilson, preached a New Freedom to counter Roosevelt’s New Nationalism. In Greenwich Village, bohemians and revolutionaries such as Emma Goldman and Mabel Dodge were a-fomenting. And even out in the heartland, young people were busily experimenting with this and that, “laying the foundations of what would become the permanent youth culture of the United States.” Free love, Jesus freaks, American power projected around the world—in many ways the time anticipated the ’60s, and it met with the same fate; at the end of WWI, the electorate swung hard to the right (though, for the first time, fewer than half of eligible voters turned out); a culture war broke out that bears strange resemblance to the red state/blue state business of today; radicalism and the youth rebellion were crushed; a crony-friendly, corrupt, rightist and pious administration took power. In all this, Traxel keeps a sharp eye out for historical patterns and luminous moments, noting here the origins of the Japanese American internment in WWII, there the birth of car culture, the rise of Hollywood and the forerunners of Rosie the Riveter.

Skilled storytelling in service to making a little-known era vivid and meaningful.