Book Review: The Republic for Which It Stands

The Republic for Which It Stands: The United states During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896
Richard White
History

On its own terms, The Republic for Which It Stands is a pretty good book. I don't recommend it, because I don't like the terms.

I'll stipulate that it's decently written, with a few flashes of wit. White has a knack for finding the telling quote, the stiletto statistic, and the sardonic aside. He's got a few consistent themes, which he follows through the three decades of his story. He's even got a central character of sorts in William Dean Howells.

He's also got an agenda--actually, several overlapping agendas. Though the language is the vernacular, the text is clearly designed to engage the academic world. The Republic etc. is a book by a professor whose purpose is to advance that professor's theoretical framework and impress other professors. His mission, broadly speaking, is deflationary. He's here to rescue us from the triumphalism of past historians, and get us to embrace a more nuanced understanding of the past, to wit: Everything Sucked.

No, that's now how he'd put it. He'd probably say that the theme of the book is how one vision for the republic--a kind of updated Jeffersonian utopia of independent freemen--failed, and a different one--industrial wage-earner capitalism--took over. But as he writes it, the real message is: Everything Sucked.

I'm not saying that White is wrong. (It's certainly true that the Heroic White Male Theory of History is pretty threadbare.) I'm saying that, right or wrong, he's just not very interesting--not, at any rate, for the general reader. The horse he's beating is dead a long time before the book ends.

You can get a sense of the book's lopsided shape just by looking in the index. Thomas Edison gets roughly the same amount of ink as the immortal Stephen Field. White mainly mentions Edison, in fact, in order to sneer at him. (White is big on sneering.) You don't have to buy into the Edison mythology to note that White is, in fact, far off base. 

Similarly, Mark Twain receives a few transient mentions, but is vastly outdone in word count by such unforgettable luminaries as Frances Willard and Thomas A. Scott. The impeachment of Andrew Johnson gets a couple of pages; federal land policy in the West with respect to the railroads gets a long, slow, screed-y chapter. You'll find precious little in TRfWITS about art, entertainment, engineering, science, music, middle-class culture, the transportation revolution, the first national parks, newspapers, or even the women's suffrage movement. No doubt too much loose talk about such things would have left the readership in danger of forgetting that Everything Sucked.

Historical revisionism, then, is the agenda. White sticks to it with messianic fervor. He's long on facts, but he's not always scrupulous in his treatment of them. For example, in deflating the story of the Cattle Kingdom, he observes that there were always fewer cattle west of the 98th meridian than east of it, except for the "burgeoning herds" of California and Texas. Which is to say, if you exclude the places where there were a lot of cows, there weren't many cows. By that same logic, more people speak English than Mandarin, if you don't count China.

It almost goes without saying that White holds religiously to the Standard Academic Liberal Catechism of History. That, by itself, wouldn't necessarily offend me--it is, to be honest, close enough to my own prejudices. White's technique, however, is to simply decline to engage with any ideas that don't fit the aforementioned Catechism. He just reiterates that Everything Sucked, owing to people and ideas that weren't as enlightened as Richard White. For example, White--quite rightly!--calls out Southern whites for their savage, revolting, contemptible, nauseating, anti-American, and ultimately successful campaign of anti-black terrorism. When it comes to violence done by people whose politics he likes, though, it counts as "achieving retributive justice". Or, at worst, it's rationalized by saying that the perpetrators "had learned, with good reason" to hate their enemies.

(You could make a drinking game out of White's pet phrases, too. Try taking a shot every time you encounter "contract," "the home," and "gendered". You'll be too soused to continue before you finish chapter 3. This probably counts as a win.)

Finally, there's a problem with White's own ostensible thesis. The notion that the later 19th century represented a conflict between two differing visions of the American future implies that there was some chance that the alternative vision--an America of sober independent freemen, where wage labor was but a way station on the way to independent producerhood, without extremes either of poverty or wealth--was anything other than a pipe dream. That's another one of White's unexamined assumptions. Other western nations were going through similar transitions at the same time, and in none of them did anything even remotely resembling this neo-Jeffersonian utopia show any signs of appearing. It's hard to accept this as a fundamental conflict when one of the combatants is a purely notional one.

Oh, and don't forget: Everything Sucked! When White, late in the book, concedes that the economy had grown rapidly for much of the period, it comes as a considerable surprise. Not to worry, though: this is just a way of leading into the depression of 1893. Every anecdote, every statistic, every character portrait, is carefully chosen for its nastiness. Because Everything Sucked.

Well, OK. Quite possibly almost everything did  suck. But this is history without story, history without characters, history shorn of everything interesting. White demonstrates no gift for descriptive writing, doesn't care about narrative structure, and (with a few exceptions) has little insight into into character. I started this book because I wanted to learn some things. I finished the book because I did learn some things. But one of the things I learned is not to read any more books by Richard White.

---

White refers many times to William Cronon's Nature's Metropolis. The latter, although also aimed at academics, is a far more enjoyable book.

Part of the reason I was disenchanted with The Republic for Which It Stands is that it's part of the Oxford History of the United States, and the previous volumes that I've read have been outstanding. Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought (1815-1848) won a Pulitzer, and richly deserved it. So did James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom (the Civil War). Gordon Wood's Empire of Liberty (1789-1815) was a finalist. I'd recommend all of these without hesitation.