| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity. By Jason Kaufman. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. xii, 286 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-19-514857-6.)

The historical sociologist Jason Kaufman challenges the rosy view that many historians take of the "golden age" of American fraternalism, roughly the years between the Civil War and World War I. Disagreeing with psychosocial arguments emphasizing the dislocations of urban-industrial development, Kaufman locates the phenomenal growth in fraternal orders in more concrete causes, specifically in working people's need for affordable sickness insurance and death/burial benefits in the years after the Civil War and in the adaptable nature of the fraternal form for interest group mobilization during the age of industrialization. Thus, businessmen, workers, immigrants, and people with agendas (such as reformers) all drew upon fraternalism to provide themselves with a modicum of security, to define collective identities, and/or to pursue group-related political activities.

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