'Rebirth of a Nation' by Jackson Lears
BOOK REVIEW
A cultural exploration of America's rise from the rubble of the Civil War and its transformation into a modern nation in the early 20th century.
Jackson Lears is a formidable, compellingly original cultural and intellectual historian.
In "No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920," Lears skillfully delineated the role of aesthetic radicals -- notably Englishmen John Ruskin and William Morris and their American disciples -- in staking out humane alternatives to consumerism that gradually shifted from social justice to ideals of therapeutic personal fulfillment. In "Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America," he explored the exploitation of that hunger for "authenticity" that resulted from the earlier process.
"Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920" is Lears' most ambitious work yet, and it builds brilliantly on those earlier projects. The Rutgers University professor makes a convincing case that the transformations America underwent in the half century's journey from out of the "long shadow of Appomattox" and into the terrible flare-lit night of the European trenches remains fundamental to our understanding of ourselves -- and to the conduct of our affairs.
What Lears makes of that is clear from the quote he takes from Herman Melville at the book's outset: "Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come." To summarize his sense of the transformation almost to the point of oversimplification: An earlier 19th century notion of "manliness" gave way to an amoral militarism, which fused with a muscular new Protestantism and evolving theories of racial supremacy; these, in turn, conjoined with a new economic order in which capital made way for capitalism. All were able to meld because each began in the post-Civil War hunger for "regeneration." The result was an assertive, aggressive, frequently intolerant national identity.
What makes "Rebirth of a Nation" so readable -- beyond the author's writerly facility -- and saves it from a descent into didacticism is Lears' skillful mining of original cultural references and his strikingly drawn portraits. This is particularly true of figures a reader already imagines knowing -- Oliver Wendell Holmes or Williams Jennings Bryan, for example -- and, especially, the great financiers. The concise portrait of the dominant Wall Street figure of the age, J.P. Morgan, is extremely well-rendered, as is the simple encapsulation of his all-transforming financial system, "Morganization," which essentially was the shift of a company's equity from interest-paying bonds to stocks that depend on earnings. (Unlike credit default swaps, it was a financial innovation that worked.)
