the48er

U.S. History 1877 - 1945

Sacco and Vanzetti: The Men, the Murders,
And the Judgment of Mankind by Bruce Watson

Eighty years ago this month Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed for a crime they probably didn't commit. But we'll never know for sure, because their trial was a farce. Both judge and jury were strongly biased against the defendants, their attorney, and their radical politics. Their lawyer was a good PR man, but incompetent as a courtroom attorney. Their conviction was a forgone conclusion, and they were never granted a retrial. In the eyes of the much of the world, however, it was not two Italian immigrants, but America itself that was on trial. When Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death, anti-American protests erupted around the globe. Says Watson,

Outside the American embassy in Paris, tanks squared off against angry mobs. London's Hyde Park teemed with protestors. Across South America, widespread walkouts shut down factories and transportation. Restless crowds swarmed the streets of Sydney, Bucharest, Berlin, Amsterdam, Rome, Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Athens, Prague, Johannesburg [and] Marrakech.

Watson spoke with Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman; also with WAMU's Diane Rehm.

Sacco and Vanzetti ... published August 16, 2007 by Viking Adult

The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped Our History by Molly Caldwell Crosby

While avian flu and Ebola are still only potential threats to America, the nation already has a long but largely forgotten history with an equally fearsome killer: yellow fever. Like Ebola, it's a hemorrhagic fever that can produce horrific symptoms and extremely high mortality rates. And as Crosby reminds us, yellow fever could return to these shores. But American Plague is more about the past than the future. It traces the origins and realities of the yellow fever outbreak of 1878 that devastated Memphis and the lower Mississippi Valley, and the efforts by medical sleuths including Walter Reed to find the cause of and effective preventatives for the disease. Because of yellow fever's ghastly symptoms and high mortality, large portions of this volume are unavoidably grisly, but the selflessness of some of those who made stunning personal sacrifices in order to save other people's lives provides an uplifting balance.

The American Plague ... published November 7, 2006 by Berkeley Hardcover

Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw

Gilded Age robber barons are among the most justifiably reviled figures in U.S. history, but the contradictions of Andrew Carnegie complicate the formula. A diminutive man who towered above other magnates of his era, Carnegie's legacy was blackened by the Homestead Strike and other laissez-faire depredations. But there was also the Anti-Imperialist League, the libraries and the peace endowment. Says Nasaw,

Andrew Carnegie's decision to give away all he earned set him apart from his contemporaries. It also, paradoxically, encouraged him to be even more ruthless a businessman and capitalist. Recognizing that the more money he earned, the more he would have to give away, he pushed his partners and his employees relentlessly forward in the pursuit of larger and larger profits, crushed the workingmen's unions he had once praised, increased the steelworkers workday from eight to twelve hours and drove down the wages.

Andrew Carnegie ... published October 24, 2006 by The Penguin Press HC

A Pickpocket's Tale: The Underworld
Of Nineteenth-Century New York by Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Using a previously unpublished autobiography of New York pickpocket, swindler and inmate George Appo, a Loyola University history prof provides a window into life as many recent immigrants knew it in lower Manhattan in the late 1900s -- after the Gangs of New York era but before the rise of most 20th century mobsters. In the process of telling Appo's life story, Gilfoyle's research sheds a light on the Gilded Age, lower-class urban life that usually disappears in the shadows of that era's robber barons. And that's an important accomplishment, since the vast majority of those pouring through Ellis Island at the time were much better acquainted with the world of George Appo than that of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. In addition to re-creating the street life, criminal hangouts and opium dens of the Five Points slum, Gilfoyle and Appo take us on a tour of jails and prisons such as The Tombs, Sing Sing and Blackwell Island, in all of which Appo at one time resided.

A Pickpocket's Tale ... published August 7, 2006 by W. W. Norton

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair by Anthony Arthur

Upton Sinclair published The Jungle a century ago this year, making this an apt time to rehabilitate the reputation of one of the 20th century's leading social reformers. With this thematically organized biography, the author shows that Sinclair's eccentricities have been grossly exaggerated and that as important as The Jungle was, Sinclair's career was vastly bigger than "merely" that.

For example, he made an extraordinary run for governor of California in 1934 under the EPIC aegis, garnering 37 percent of the vote, despite being subjected to one of the ugliest instances of red-baiting in U.S. history. And Arthur, a retired English prof, reminds us that while Sinclair's most often-remembered book was published in the early 20th century, he was also an important literary light of the 1940s and '50s: From-1940-53, he wrote the 11-novel "Lanny Budd" series, essentially a history of the 20th century's political tumults to that point. Dragon's Teeth, the third book in the series, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1943.

Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair ... published June 6, 2006 by Random House

The Defining Moment:
FDR's Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope by Jonathan Alter

FDR may be ... remembered for bringing victory in World War II, but ... he did so only with the help of the Allies. The first time he saved democracy, in 1933, he accomplished it more on his own, by convincing the American people that they should not give up on their system of government. Before he confronted fascism abroad, he blunted the potential of both fascism and communism at home.

Alter, a Newsweek columnist, shows that when Franklin Roosevelt took office during the depths of the Depression, many Americans wanted him to assume dictatorial powers with which to attack the crisis. Newly unearthed documents provide tantalizing evidence that FDR may have seriously considered obliging. (In 1933 Mussolini still had many American admirers; Hitler was relatively new and unknown.) Alter celebrates Roosevelt's rejection of such notions and FDR's reassuring and palpable affirmations of democratic republicanism in the earliest days of his presidency.

*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD or Cassette

The Defining Moment ... published May 2, 2006 by Simon & Schuster

Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long by Richard White

In the 1930's, when Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco ruled in Europe, Huey Long was their Louisiana cousin, cajoling or seizing power over all branches of his state's government. He even used the state militia as a personal police force and declared martial law in uncooperative communities. Never before or since in U.S. history would a populist demagogue gather unto himself such far-reaching dictatorial powers.

On the other hand, says LSU professor White, Long was also an effective champion for Depression-era Louisianans. He saw to the building of 9,000 miles of new roads and put free textbooks into the hands of children who might otherwise have gone without schooling. LSU's quality and prestige rose appreciably under Long's direction, and his tax and healthcare policies helped provide relief to many of his state's poor.

Long constitutes one of America's most intriguing (and uncomfortable) what-ifs: his 1936 presidential bid seemed certain -- until he was shot dead in 1935.

Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long ... published April 4, 2006 by Random House

Death in the Haymarket by James Green

On May 1, 1886, Chicago workers struck for an eight-hour workday -- as opposed to the prevailing 10, 12, or more hours -- six days a week -- that were typical. At a May 4 political rally in Chicago's Haymarket Square in support of the strike, an unknown person threw a bomb at a police formation; eight officers died. On virtually no evidence, Illinois then hanged the rally's leaders, since known as the Haymarket Martyrs. This retelling of the story is both scrupulously researched and vividly told, offering insights into the decades of agitation and counter-measures that led up to the tragedies as well as the generations of repercussions that followed. The author shows how American media used the crisis to whip up middle class fears of "foreigners" and "anarchists," dealing a severe and long-lasting blow to the American labor movement.

Death in the Haymarket ... first published March 7, 2006 by Pantheon

Lighting the Way: Nine Women Who
Changed Modern America by Karenna Gore Schiff

Al and Tipper Gore's daughter says that after campaigning hard for her father in 2000, she dealt with the aftermath in part by producing this book, which profiles nine women who succeeded in moving America in more progressive directions. The merit of such projects rests heavily on the choices of subjects, and Gore Schiff chose well. Her choices include anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett, labor organizer Mother Jones, medical pioneer Alice Hamilton, and Franklin Roosevelt's Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, who, in a spirit evinced throughout this book, said, "I didn't come here to work for the press anyway. I came to work for God, F.D.R. and the millions of forgotten, plain, common working men." Also featured are civil rights activist Virginia Durr, educator and civil rights activist Septima Poinsette Clark, agricultural unionist Dolores Huerta, physician Helen Rodriguez-Trias, and Association to Benefit Children founder Gretchen Buchenholz.

Lighting the Way ... published February 8, 2006 by Miramax

A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan by Michael Kazin

William Jennings Bryan is a giant of U.S. history; one might think the thrice-nominated Democratic populist candidate for president (1896, 1900, 1908) would be a favorite of American progressives. Unfortunately though, he's now remembered mostly for two very ugly portrayals: by Frederic March in Inherit the Wind and in H.L. Mencken's raw obituary. Kazin works hard to rehabilitate Bryan's shredded reputation and generally succeeds, restoring to view the pre-Scopes figure once beloved of millions of American laborers and farmers. Bryan's religious fervor was, we see, not at all the doltish fundamentalism of Inherit the Wind, but rather the righteousness of a basically decent man who took seriously the essential tenets of the Social Gospel. While Kazin's been rightly faulted for glossing some of Bryan's faults, the author's deference might also be viewed as appropriate to the effort of restoring a more balanced view of one of American's most consequential politicians.

A Godly Hero ... published February 7, 2006 by Knopf

The Colony by John Tayman

From 1866-1969, Hawaiian and American governments incarcerated over 8,000 people who had or were suspected of having leprosy on a nearly inaccessible peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. Some of the circumstances of those incarcerations should be instructive to 21st-century readers, since extensive forcible quarantining is widely contemplated as a response to avian flu, weaponized smallpox, etc.

But beyond the fact that he offers an important cautionary tale, Tayman, a veteran magazine editor, also delivers some very compelling storytelling in its own right. Most of the tales are profoundly sad and riddled with instances of ignorance leading to gross injustice, but there's also much heroism to celebrate -- such as that of Father Damien, a Catholic missionary who's in the process of being sainted for his work on Molokai.

Renee Montagne interviewed Tayman about his book on NPR's Morning Edition.

*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD and mp3 CD

The Colony ... first published January 9, 2006 by Scribner

The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan

In the 1920s, would-be farmers in the Texas Panhandle and the surrounding plains plowed up a vast prairie that never should've been plowed; the result was the Dust Bowl. While Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath ensured that the world would remember those who fled, Egan notes that "most of the people living in the center of the Dust Bowl, about two-thirds of the population in 1930, never left during that hard decade." By following the fortunes, then profound misfortunes, of a handful of families and communities, The Worst Hard Time supplies a powerfully evocative and very human chronicle of what it was like to try to survive the worst sustained ecological catastrophe in U.S. history. Incredibly, today's Panhandle-area corporate farmers are knowingly causing another environmental disaster of biblical proportions by drawing down the Ogallala Aquifer (one of the world's largest) so fast it may not survive this century.

NPR's Debbie Eliott spoke with Egan on All Things Considered.

*Also available, unabridged, on Audio CD

The Worst Hard Time ... first published December 14, 2005 by Houghton Mifflin

An Unplanned Life by George McKee Elsey

Turns out there's still someone alive and well who held key posts in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. George McKee Elsey (now 87) offers a charming, interesting memoir of his work in some of the mid-20th century's most crucial command posts: he started with FDR as an young naval officer in the presidential map room during World War II, and eventually served as a special civilian counsel to President Truman. From his White House years until his 1990 retirement, Elsey worked in numerous capacities with the Red Cross, including serving 12 years as the organization's president. There's a lot to like about his easygoing narrative voice, yet he's not grown so mellow as to have airbrushed or sanitized the reality and insights out of his memories. For example, Truman periodically seems a bit clueless and disengaged -- an unthinkable condition for a U.S. president, I know, but it's true.

Elsey was featured on NPR's Morning Edition.

An Unplanned Life ... published November 30, 2005 by University of Missouri Press

Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers

Ken Burns and Mark Twain himself give this one a thumbs-up, and on settling in with it, the words "definitive Twain biography" begin to cross one's mind. Progressives should find the chapters concerning the final decade of Twain's life to be particularly interesting. His writings and speeches of those years were highly political, and he served as a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. Says Powers,

Mark Twain's position on the Philippine war, when it finally coalesced, beggared the Democrats' timidity and the Republicans' bombast. It quickly blossomed into the representative, and prophetic, voice of principled American dissent. It defined the public work of his last ten years. Yet it did not stand alongside his literary legacy for many decades after his death, and for good reason. When his posthumous protectors ... [propped] him up in the perfumed costume of a polite National Uncle -- his social justice essays suffered the same fate as did his more extreme screeds against religion and mankind: deemphasis, obfuscation, and outright suppression.

The Pulitzer and Emmy prizewinning author neatly arrests that literary larceny and instead delivers a fully realized Twain, going so far as to say that all of his oeuvre is problematic, many of his works are mediocre and some even worse. In terms of both his literature and his life, Powers' Twain is infinitely more interesting -- and politically active -- than the National Uncle most Americans heard about in high school.

*Also available, in abridgement, on Audio CD.

Mark Twain: A Life ... first published September 13, 2005 by Free Press

The People's Tycoon by Steven Watts

Henry Ford exhibited both some of what's best and much of what's worst about America. Although unschooled, he was bright and ambitious, and as an employer he paid much higher-than-prevailing wages in exchange for a then progressive 8-hour workday. But he was also a bigot -- so virulent an anti-Semite that Adolph Hitler not only admired him, but to some degree based his own beliefs on materials Ford had published.

Because Ford has long been larger than life in the public imagination, says Watts, the biographer must demythologize both the man and the phenomenon based on the abundant primary sources that Ford and others left behind. Watts traces the myriad ways in which the tycoon fundamentally changed American culture, and in the process manipulated popular media to elevate himself to the status of populist folk hero -- the ultimate self-made man. Watts strips away the facade that time and Ford himself built, giving the reader a well-drawn portrait of a man who, for better and worse, remade not only America, but the world.

The People's Tycoon ... first published August 9, 2005 by Knopf