A searching study of institutional inequality, much of it wrought, then as now, by the South.
“Three-fourths of us are disenfranchised; yet no writer on democratic reform says a word about Negroes.” Thus W.E.B. DuBois, writing in 1935 at the height of the New Deal. Katznelson (Political Science/Columbia Univ.) ponders how it could be that in the declining years of Jim Crow, the disenfranchisement of African-Americans could grow rather than weaken; most people in most regions had been affected in one way or another by the Depression, but in the South, where the average per capita income was half that of the rest of the country, black male workers earned a third of what even poor whites did, $565 a year against $1,535. Every other index was weighed against blacks: their health was poorer, their rate of homeownership lower, their acreage smaller and less productive. Aid programs organized by the various alphabet agencies of the New Deal did little to change the configuration, Katznelson writes, because the former slave states of the South fielded members on Capitol Hill who saw to it that relief went to white constituents. And because the Roosevelt administration was beholden to the South for votes, it did almost nothing to advance civil rights for African-Americans: “There would be no anti-lynching law on President Roosevelt’s watch,” Katznelson writes, “nor would racial hierarchies in the armed forces or federal agencies be disturbed in any basic way.” The gap would even widen following WWII, a time when other non-black minorities, such as Jews and Catholics, enjoyed “the extension of American pluralism and tolerance.” Katznelson does good service in excavating the archaeology of institutional racism, which, he notes, was brought about bit by bit, and not as a coherent program, and was thus easy to overlook.
Katznelson also deepens our understanding of the modern civil rights movement, which begins in the 1930s, not the 1960s: a thoughtful account for readers with an interest in that history.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05213-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
Categories: HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
