The Age of Acrimony

March 1, 2021
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.

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Starred review from April 1, 2021

Presidential elections following the American Civil War were highly contested affairs. White Americans men voters often aligned themselves closely with one of the two main parties, which were heavily influenced by party bosses and political machines. Voter turnout averaged 77 percent; however, the era also saw one president impeached, three assassinations, and two presidents lose the popular vote but win the electoral college. By the early 1900s, measures were introduced by middle- and upper-class reformers with the aim of stabilizing U.S. politics, but they instead decreased voter turnout. The introduction of the secret ballot destroyed the power of machine bosses; racist terrorism and lynchings depressed turnout of Black voters in the South; and new laws kept recent immigrants from voting. This turbulent time in American politics is expertly captured by historian Grinspan (Smithsonian National Museum of American History; The Virgin Vote), primarily via the work of Pennsylvania congressman William "Pig Iron" Kelley and his activist daughter Florence Kelley. The highly readable account is based on extensive primary resources, such as the voluminous correspondence between the Kelleys. VERDICT This compelling history of a time that mirrors our own will be enjoyed by readers interested in American history and politics.--Chad E. Statler, Westlake Porter P.L., Westlake, OH

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