If today’s political divisions are frightening, Grinspan’s lucid history soothes by recounting when it was far worse.
Think the present-day politics of hate and fear are bad? It’s all child’s play compared to the half-century following the Civil War.
We wish politics to be civil, writes Grinspan, curator of political history at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. However, the thought that politics should be restrained amounts to “a historical outlier…an invention, the end result of a brutal fight that raged across American life in the late 1800s.” That battle was fought on many fronts. There was the terrorism of Reconstruction, in which an intransigent South managed to elude the spirit of abolition by reconstructing a racist regime. There were the industrialists, battling labor, and labor battling the industrialists—not just through strikes and union agitation, but also through the new instrument of the ballot box. There were also immigrants versus nativists. Grinspan observes that for a good part of the era, the Republican Party held near hegemony. “Never in American history,” he writes, “except possibly for the Virginians of the founding generation, was one bloc so dominant as the postwar northern Republicans.” Whether they used that power effectively is one of the author’s points of discussion, but “atrocious violence” was a conditioning factor: three presidents assassinated, Black Americans lynched, a “cycle of rage” roiling around the polity. Things began to improve, writes Grinspan, when progressives such as Theodore Roosevelt entered the scene and argued successfully that the prevailing view that all politics was corrupt was an excuse for cynicism and inaction. “It is difficult to see the indomitable Theodore Roosevelt as an emblem of restraint,” he writes, but that, in combination with the long-lived politician Will “Pig Iron” Kelley, helped tamp things down. In a highly readable narrative, Grinspan also forges some unexpected connections—linking, for instance, the women’s enfranchisement movement (largely composed of White Protestant women) with a drive “to offset the power of the working-class and increasingly foreign-born male electorate.”
If today’s political divisions are frightening, Grinspan’s lucid history soothes by recounting when it was far worse.Pub Date: April 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63557-462-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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