We The People

Abstract

We The People Elaine Frantz (bio) Richard White. The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896. (The Oxford History of the United States.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xx + 941 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $35.00. "During the Gilded Age," Richard White argues in his book's introduction, "the actions of millions mattered more than the actions of a few" (p. 3). Americans emerging from the Civil War dreamed of a producer's republic, which to them, in a narrow sense, meant that white laboring men would dominate political power. In the broader sense, it was a shared commitment to the abstract idea that public resources, and political, economic, and social power would be shared in common, and that the whole body of Americans would hold in check those elites who might threaten to monopolize them. Not only white working men but African Americans, Native Americans, and women drew upon this democratic rhetoric to demand rights and power. Yet during an age in which this ideology reigned, the elite few dramatically concentrated power and resources. The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 explains how the 1865 Republican promise devolved into a massive expansion of government capacity which quite successfully siphoned public resources into the pockets of a new economic elite. White grounds his analysis in the concrete physical realities shaping American life: crop yields, mineral deposits, food quality and safety, cattle varieties and diseases, precipitation, rates of workplace accidental deaths. Yet he shows that facts on the ground rarely led directly to rational political, social, or economic analysis or response. White shows the most respected Gilded Age individuals to be confused by the forces around them. Unable to comprehend the complex and constantly changing nation, powerful men created usable realities, writing speculative fictions presented as sober descriptions. These men justified consequential decisions with the flimsiest of logics. Many are familiar with White's view of the bumbling incompetence of those who built and financed the transcontinental railroads: here White restates and broadens this framework. As Congress repeatedly allocated massive funding to produce [End Page 539] westward expansion, for instance, they insisted that they were not promoting it at all, but simply controlling an inevitable and natural movement. Frederick Taylor's time management was "guesswork posing as calculation" (p. 677). Thomas Edison "often failed to predict the practical results of his early inventions, but he excelled at turning the inventions into tools of self-promotion" (p. 681). Elites became such not by understanding the facts on the ground but by using the power of narrative to justify the creation of real structures and the appropriation of real resources from "the millions." The supremacy of narrative over ideology and institutional structures, and the capacity of storytelling to preempt democratic processes is a central insight of White's book. Ideology mattered, and the struggle between labor republicanism and liberalism weaves through the book, but ideology was itself malleable and situational. Many Americans, for instance, had deep ideological objection to land distribution when confronted with freedpeople's demands in the postwar South, but not to the massive redistribution of Indian lands to white settlers (p. 44). The state assumed unprecedented new powers in the west and gave away large portions of the public lands to corporations, all in the name of promoting liberal individualism and the family home (pp. 113–114). And personality quirks and conflicts and alliances among elites often did more to shape politicians' positions on public issues than did ideology. The law mattered: the government came into itself in these years, gaining new regulatory powers and developing the capacity to exercise them. It moved from a system of governance based on fees and private contracts to a more formalized bureaucracy designed to limit personal favor (pp. 356–359). Yet institutional structures, like corporations, never worked in practice as they were designed. Governmental power, like resources and ideologies, continued to be distributed through narratives and networks of relationships. White is an excellent stylist, which is a necessity rather than a luxury for a 941-page book. He intersperses slivers...