Sydney Williams on The Age of Acrimony by Jon Grinspan
“There is incredible variability in how we have used our democracy, with plenty of room for ugliness without apocalypse, and for reform without utopia.” Jon Grinspan
The preamble to the Constitution begins: “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union…” The emphasis is on “more.” The Founders never claimed to have formed a “perfect” Union, but one better than those that then existed. Also, in providing a process to improve and adjust the Constitution amendments were permitted. In fact, the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were ratified on December 15, 1791. In the subsequent 230 years, seventeen additional amendments have been ratified. Our democracy is not static; it adjusts, not easily but judiciously, as customs and behaviors change. Jon Grinspan has given us, who now live in a new age of political strife, a well-written – albeit brief – informative look at the fifty years following the Civil War – a time of political acrimony.
The time span covered by Mr. Grinspan – 1865 to 1915 – begins with the assassination of Lincoln and a Country emerging from the Civil War; it ends with the United States having surpassed Britain as the world’s largest industrial power. He takes us through Reconstruction and how it petered out, with violence in the South against blacks and with the North having given up on the concept of equal rights. We travel through the “Gilded Age” when fortunes were made in railroads, mining, oil, steel, electricity, shipping, newspapers and finance, and when former farmhands, women and children were recruited to work in city sweat shops and factories, where they performed low-paying, mind-numbing (often dangerous) repetitive jobs. His story ends with the reforms of the “Progressive Era.” In the early post-Civil War period, the public wanted the entertainment that political campaigners provided: “They expected charisma and wit and the hottest-burning fuel of the era: political outrage.” During these fifty years, we saw eleven Presidents, high voter turnout and two Presidents assassinated, Garfield and McKinley. Voter turnout peaked in the election of 1896 at 79.5%. Twenty-eight years later it troughed at 48.8% in 1924. While Republicans dominated the White House during the fifty years covered by Mr. Grinspan, elections were always close. The only two Presidents to be elected with more than 53% of the popular vote during that period were Ulysses Grant in 1872 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Presidential election winners in 1880,1884, 1888, 1892 and 1912 won with less than 50% of the popular vote.
The author employs the father-daughter team of William D. “Pig Iron” Kelley (1814-1890) and Florence Kelley (1859-1932) to guide us through the political history of that era. Will Kelley was a thirty-year Republican member of Congress from Philadelphia. He had been an abolitionist and was a supporter of tariffs, especially on pig iron, an intermediate product used in the manufacture of steel, products important to Pennsylvania’s economy. A self-made man and exceptional public speaker, he loved the heat of political battle: “These are terrible times for timid people.” Florence Kelley, as a young girl, devoured the books in her father’s library. She became a political activist and social reformer. She graduated from Cornell and studied under the German economist Friedrich Engels. While her father was a politician, Grinspan writes: “Florie was beginning to see the limits on American electoral politics as a solution to social problems…imagining a future unchecked by constituents.” She had grown up in a time when politics were prized but not governance. She preferred the concept of professional bureaucrats to run government, not elected officials. She fought against sweat shops, and she fought for a minimum wage, an eight-hour day and the rights of children. She founded the National Consumer League and was a co-founder of the NAACP.
One is tempted, in looking back from today’s rancorous political atmosphere, to acknowledge truth in the old saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same. But that is not correct, at least not in this instance. While both then and now were [and are] characterized by rapid commercial advancement and acrimonious politics, there are significant differences. Wealth gaps have narrowed, and college graduation rates have improved. In terms of wealth gaps, Mr. Grinspan quotes one source that claimed 5,000 people controlled 50% of the wealth in the 1880s, or one hundredth of one percent of the then population. Today, approximately one percent (3.3 million people) own 43% of the nation’s wealth. Theodore Roosevelt’s trust busting, the implementation of a federal income tax in 1913 and an estate tax in 1916 helped mitigate wealth inequalities. As for education, college graduates, as a percent of the population, have gone from two percent in 1900 to more than a third today. The 19th Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 greatly expanded voter rolls. On the darker side, however, unaccountable bureaucrats – those desired by Florence Kelley – have changed the nature of a government into one less responsive to the people.
Yet, one finishes Mr. Grinspan’s book with a sense of optimism. As the rubric above this essay suggests, our democracy is versatile. It has been, is now, and will be tested. It bends but does not easily break. Nevertheless, liberty is precious and must be guarded. Everything has its breaking point. All laws, rules and regulations present a tug-of-war between the rights of individuals versus the needs of society. It is the balance a democracy seeks. In a speech at the Wisconsin State Far in September 1859, Abraham Lincoln quoted the ancient adage attributed to a Persian monarch: “And this, too, shall pass away.” But he added that the saying was “not quite true.” He pointed out that it is the cultivation of the physical, moral and intellectual worlds within each of us that sets the course toward prosperity and happiness, in our quest for the “more perfect union.” Lincoln’s point in his speech: It is only because of the efforts of individuals that the forward trajectory of democracy shall not pass away. Mr. Grinspan has provided a pertinent and providential history of our experiment with a democratic republic, during an acrimonious time.
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