Wealth and Democracy

Reading this morning that the 40 richest persons in the world have a combined wealth of over $1 trillion, I found myself searching for books on how it came to be this way in an age of unprecedented worldwide democracy. I came across Jack Beatty's dark look at the Gilded Age, which he calls an Age of Betrayal. Indeed, this was a time when we were supposed to be redeeming the recalcitrant Southern states and ushering in a new age of civic freedom. Instead, we saw a great consolidation of wealth, which would last until well into the 20th century, before the Roosevelt-Taft anti-monopoly laws finally took effect, and the introduction of federal income tax. Beatty explores the period 1865-1900, when that consolidation of wealth took place. Looks like hard reading,

Beatty leaves it to others to describe the glamour of the Gilded Age. Instead he makes viscerally clear the grinding poverty, the bloody racial hatred, the violent labor strikes, and the corrupt politics that also characterize that era. And he makes clear, too, the parallels with our own time, where once again a yawning gap has opened between rich and poor, and political influence is available for the taking by anyone willing and able to pay.

From The Atlantic

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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