Review by Choice Review
At a time when American politics has become increasingly divisive, Grinspan (curator of political history, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution) offers an engaging study of the period spanning the end of the Civil War to the Progressive Era. This tumultuous period produced some of the deepest partisan divisions and raucous presidential campaigns in American history yet ended with reformers taming the worst aspects of political competition and producing the calmer campaign style that became the norm for much of the 20th century. Grinspan also traces the careers of radical Representative William "Pig Iron" Kelley and his daughter, labor activist Florence Kelley, as they reacted to and helped shape the political debate of their time. He maintains that the "cooling" of the election process came at a price: late-19th-century elections drew voters to the polls in large numbers, but the more civilized campaigns of the early 20th century resulted in declining voter participation. The bibliography reveals the author's extensive research in archival collections, published diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, published letters, and other primary sources, alongside secondary resources. This is a thought-provoking narrative of how American democracy can and does reinvent itself. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers, advanced undergraduates through faculty, and professionals. --Jerry Purvis Sanson, formerly, Louisiana State University at Alexandria
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Today's political vitriol pales beside the 19th century's rabid partisanship as depicted in this raucous history of Gilded Age electioneering. Historian Grinspan (The Virgin Vote) examines the post--Civil War era when politics--and much of civil society--were built around fanatical allegiances to the Republican and Democratic parties. The upside, he argues, was a passionate mass politics of enormous, torch-lit rallies that included immigrants, workers, women, and Blacks, with voter turnout averaging 77%. The downside was pervasive corruption under party bosses dispensing patronage, partisan violence enabled by public balloting (in the South, white Democrats killed hundreds of African American Republicans), and government gridlock. A sea change, Ginspan contends, developed in the 1890s as reformers instituted secret ballots, civil-service reform ended patronage, and campaigns reoriented towards individual candidates and genteel debate, at the cost of a drastic decline in working-class voting. Grinspan vividly recreates the period's tumults and personalities--he foregrounds the colorful father-daughter duo of Republican congressman William Kelley and Socialist activist Florence Kelley--while shrewdly analyzing its evolving culture of civic engagement, conveying it all in snappy, evocative prose. This immersive study shows how the form of politics profoundly shapes its content. Agent: Katherine Flynn, Kneerim & Williams. (Apr.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
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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Review by Kirkus Book Review
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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
