A lucid overview for students of American history and politics.
A highly accessible survey of the Progressive Era, linking its reformist movements to their fruition—or, sometimes, repudiation—in the decades that followed.
“We live in a politically disappointing time,” writes McGerr (History/Indiana Univ.), and certainly as compared to the tumultuous half-century when progressive movements of various stripes worked to rein in corporate power and make the nation safe for democracy. McGerr elaborates: the Progressive Era inaugurated the “American Century,” a period that was resolutely liberal and that ended early in the racial backlash, social upheaval, and sour economy of the late 1960s and the conservative counterrevolution that ensued. At its origin, McGerr holds, progressivism was an economic movement, a reaction against the “upper ten”—the percentage of society as measured by wealth, that is, which really turns out to have been a mere one or two percent of the population who controlled “fortunes with few parallels in history.” Through campaigns for graduated taxation on income and inheritances, workers’ rights, a humane workday, and other measures, progressives such as Jane Addams managed to curb some of the power of this superclass, always stopping short of calling for pure socialism—for most progressives of the time mistrusted the deterministic, Marxist view of the class struggle, and in any event European socialism clashed with nativist sensibilities, which, as McGerr does not hesitate to acknowledge, lent progressivism a racist edge. (“The progressives’ . . . political weakness,” he writes, “was their willingness to segregate the ballot box, and thereby keep so many Americans out of the battle against privilege.”) The fundamental goal of progressivism, he suggests, was to end the battle between labor and capital, but the struggle spilled out in other directions, such as Carrie Nation’s campaign to rid America of the evils of alcohol (which, she argued, contributed to crime, prostitution, and the oppression of women) and Sherwood Anderson’s mission to bed as many women as he could in the name of sexual liberation—quests that would be replayed by others in the years to come.
A lucid overview for students of American history and politics.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-684-85975-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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