History of the United States – Harvey Wasserman

History of the United States – Harvey Wasserman, Perennial Library/Harper & Row Publishers, 1972, 262 pp. (LF) ***

It is interesting to see how a book now almost thirty-five years old, has held its water over the years. Wasserman’s look at the Gilded Age, or to use the muckrakers more preferred term, the “Robber Baron” period, takes a populist approach to the period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as well as a peak at the progressive period in the early decades of the twentieth. While it is clear that the book was written as a reaction to the more ponderous, weighty works of history yore, the title itself makes for a bigger billing than its actual bite. Since the work is confined to the period aforementioned, the reader must look past the misleading title, to read Wasserman’s accounts of some of the more infamous events of the period, be it the Ludlow massacre or the Haymarket bombing. Familiar names like Eugene Debs, Mary “Mother” Jones, and Emma Goldman are given their righteous due, though in his follow up on the women’s movement, Margaret Sanger gets noted while Elizabeth Caty Stanton and Susan B. Anthony are oddly left out. In the age of Karl Rove, it is certainly interesting to read of Mark Hanna (a man Rove likes to believe he fashions himself after) and his Republican-corporate propaganda machine and the suspicious tally of the 1896 election where there were more ballots cast than actual voters. (Given the known theft of the 2000 presidential election and the likely theft of the 2004 election, it is interesting to read of this precedent, which may serve as more of a guide to the Bush administration than many may comfortably wish to believe [i.e. both pursued a foreign policy of aggressive, militarily engaged expansionism in the milieu of crony corporatism on the domestic front].) However, not to be outdone, Wasserman also writes of the post-Civil War southern Democrats of the 1870s that “in undisputed control of the electoral machinery, the Democrats stole at the ballot box those elections they could not win by persuasion.”(p. 85) Wasserman also explores the movements of third party entities and labor unions with the likes of the Farmers’ Alliance, the Southern Alliance, the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the IWW Wobblies, and the Grange movement, where in some instances, race relations were bridged when a broader class consciousness was realized. It is interesting to read how much economic power some of these groups wielded against industry, however fleeting such moments may have been. With the advent of radio and other technology and the urbanization of the population, these movements subsided and membership declined so that organizations became obsolete in the face of post-industrial modernism and middle-class consumerism. Nonetheless, in the age of Wal-Martization, one can’t help reading admiringly of the days when labor had its say and was listened to.