Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900
 
Please Login or Join to Download.

Thumbnails:

Description:

From Publishers Weekly Atlantic Monthly editor Beatty (The Rascal King) clearly invokes a comparison with the present in writing of how, he says, corporations, not the people, ruled America in the Gilded Age. He examines the role of the railroads as the engine of capitalism, the role of protectionist tariffs in raising prices for the common man and how "representative government gave way to bought government." But Beatty ignores the latest literature on that period by the likes of Charles R. Morris, Maury Klein, David Nasaw and David Cannadine. Instead, the post–Civil War industrial boom depicted by Beatty mimics that described by the now largely discredited Matthew Josephson--author in the 1930s of The Robber Barons--whose works Beatty cites. Beatty also references other now-marginalized class-warrior historians, such as Gustavus Myers, in portraying capitalism as a sort of zero-sum game where a dollar pocketed by one individual is inevitably a buck stolen from someone else, overlooking the notion of visionary entrepreneurs creating a surging tide of capital upon which all boats rise. Beatty's view of history seems guided by his liberal impulses and his disillusioned view of American democracy today--not the best way to approach history. B&w illus. (Apr. 16) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com "Having redeemed democracy in the Civil War," laments Jack Beatty, "America betrayed it in the Gilded Age." These opening words neatly capture the premise and promise of Age of Betrayal, an ambitious and politically charged work that spans far more terrain than its subtitle suggests. The redemption, of course, is the demise of American slavery. The betrayal, however, is the rise of rapacious industrial corporations in the decades immediately following the war -- a rise Beatty believes merely distributed inequality and injustice more equitably. The ascent of such business interests, he contends, was enabled by corrupt governments, a pliant judiciary and a malleable populace that, with the exception of the Populist movement, remained too traumatized and divided by the war to put up much of a fight. Beatty's journey starts on the railways that began crisscrossing the nation before the war. Railroads accelerated and cheapened transportation, helped "knit back together a broken Union" and revolutionized work in urban factories and in farms -- all at the cost of unprecedented concentrations of wealth and workplace conditions that crushed body and spirit. Politicians in cahoots with railway executives made it simple. "Of the seventy-three men who held cabinet posts between 1868 and 1896," Beatty calculates, "forty-eight either served railroad clients, lobbied for railroads, sat on railroad boards, or had railroad-connected relatives." So pervasive was the rail industry's power, Beatty notes, that in 1883 the railways even stopped time. Previously, the United States had some 80 different time zones, but for the sake of efficiency, local times gave way to a standardized system. "The sun told time from Genesis to 12:01 A.M. on November 18, 1883, when the railroads dispensed with it," quips Beatty. A senior editor with the Atlantic Monthly, Beatty is skilled at connecting unlikely dots and revealing unintended consequences. One of his most compelling narratives shows how the 14th Amendment to the Constitution -- extending equal protection and due process to all persons -- eventually led to the notion of a corporation as a legal "person." This produced an "Inverted Constitution," with economic rights trumping civil ones. "The 'person' whose 'life, liberty, or property' the Fourteenth Amendment secured," Beatty writes, "was not the freedman but the corporation." Other writers, such as Charles Morris in his 2005 book The Tycoons, have written convincingly about this era with more favorable eyes, stressing the arrival of new industrial technologies and a burgeoning middle class. Beatty emphasizes the downside of su

Submitted On:

09 Sep 2007

File Author:

Beatty, Jack

File Size:

4.53 MB