The Broken Heart of America

February 10, 2020
This exhaustive and politically minded history of St. Louis, Mo., by Harvard history professor Johnson (Soul by Soul) indicts the city’s treatment of its minority residents. Opening with the 1804 Lewis and Clark Expedition, which set out from St. Louis and led to the forcible removal of Native Americans from their lands, Johnson details Missouri’s admission to the U.S. as a slave state; the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which originated in St. Louis; and the emergence of ragtime music from the “barrooms and bordellos” of the city’s Deep Morgan district. In later chapters, he explores how the redevelopment of the city’s riverfront and the construction of the Gateway Arch in the 1960s displaced black residents, and argues that the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, Mo., and the unrest that followed “exemplif the history of structural racism” in the region. Johnson makes a persuasive case that “St. Louis has been the crucible of American history,” and his celebration of the city’s defiant black culture heightens the book’s potency. Progressive readers interested in African-American and Western history will savor this incisive and troubling account.

February 15, 2020
A Harvard professor of history and African American studies posits that studying the history of St. Louis can help explain more than 200 years of racism and exploitation in the U.S. "This book," writes Johnson, a Missouri native, "traces the history of empire and racial capitalism through a series of stages, beginning with the fur trade in the early nineteenth century and following all the way down to payday lending, tax abatement, for-profit policing, and mass incarceration in our own times." In a narrative of unrelenting, justified outrage grounded in impressive scholarship, Johnson proceeds mostly chronologically. He begins in early-19th-century St. Louis, a city that served as a base for a violent white-dominated government and military, which murdered Native Americans in massive numbers, with impunity, while driving them away from their long-established homelands. After the eradication of Native communities, they turned their violent intentions toward black communities. Many of those black residents had lived in metropolitan St. Louis for generations; tens of thousands more had arrived from the Deep South hoping to escape the aftermath of slavery. Instead, they encountered a slavery of sorts based on low-wage employment; segregated, substandard housing, transportation, and schooling; and frequent emotional and physical violence. Johnson explains the nature of structural racism, including how it flows naturally from rampant capitalism. Although occasional passages qualify as theoretical--and may only appeal to fellow historians--every chapter includes searing, unforgettable examples. White men often portrayed as heroes are shown by Johnson to be bigots, including Lewis and Clark and Thomas Hart Benton, but the author also exposes plenty of unsavory characters who will be unknown to readers without a familiarity with St. Louis history. Johnson offers plenty of evidence from the current century, as well, including the police murder of Michael Brown in the suburb of Ferguson. The epilogue offers hope, however minimal, that residents can imagine "new ways to live in the city, to connect with and care for one another, to be human." A well-rendered, incisive exploration of "a history of serial dispossession and imperial violence."

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April 15, 2020
The 2014 murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, led prizewinning historian and Missouri native Johnson (River of Dark Dreams, 2013) to, as he put it, take the measure of a history he had lived through but not yet fully understood. Johnson approaches St. Louis with the interpretive tools of his work on the intersection of American capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. He vividly describes its neighborhoods, personalities, and historical conflicts while emphasizing how segregation, disinvestment, and race-based economic extraction eventually set the stage for Ferguson. St. Louis has a long history of inventing and refining what became standard white American methods of dealing with others ?be they Native Americans, African Americans, or non-Americans?using physical removals, resource grabs, and political disenfranchisement to establish control. Now a hard-luck region, it stays true to this heritage, profiting from fines and fees imposed on the poor in a new form of resource extraction. At once gentle and dystopian, Johnson's history of an American city issues an important warning to not ignore the rotten spots in the country's foundation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2020

In this latest work, Johnson (River of Dark Dreams) examines St. Louis as a case study for a compelling reinterpretation of American history. From appropriation of Native American lands by Europeans to 21st-century police violence, the city's history is viewed through the lens of racial capitalism, described by Johnson as white supremacy plus empire, extraction, and exploitation. Johnson explains how, in the history of St. Louis, racial capitalism is evident in the violent resistance to biracial labor organizing in the early 20th century, in midcentury zoning laws and restrictive covenants that enforced residential segregation, and in more recent corporate tax incentives that decimated state and local government budgets. Though presented chronologically, Johnson effectively traces the continuous threads that run through this history, comparing 19th-century Indian removal to 1960s urban renewal, and an antebellum murder of a free Black woman to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson. VERDICT Although focused primarily on the history of St. Louis and surrounding areas, this well researched and thoroughly documented work is too important to be dismissed as a strictly regional history. Highly recommended for all readers interested in American history.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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