Book Review

Ideology and Politics in the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era

Michael Les Benedict
Ohio State University

Cohen, Nancy. The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xi + 318 pp.  Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index, $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2670-7; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5354-2.

Perman, Michael. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xiii + 397 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2593-X; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4909-X.

These three books deal in overlapping ways with what historians have long recognized as important developments in the Gilded Age and Progressive eras-the retreat from Reconstruction, the response to a radically changing economic environment, and the re-institution of white supremacy through disfranchisement and legal segregation in the South. All offer revised interpretations and new insights. Richardson's and Cohen's studies, with their central attention to the interaction of race and class, fit well with the currently dominant interests and approaches of American historians. Perman's, despite its obvious concern with race, hearkens to an older tradition of political history and has already been somewhat condescendingly praised in a positive review as "monumentally solid" but "not. . .as creative as many current works in the field."1 They are all worth reading-indeed, essential reading for those with a direct interest in the specific questions they address-not only for their information and insights but for fundamental issues they raise about how historians are going about our business.

1

In The Death of Reconstruction, her second book,2 Heather Cox Richardson, formerly at MIT, explains why those elements of the northern Republican party often identified as liberal reformers abandoned the effort to reconstruct southern society on the basis of racial justice. Relying on a thorough investigation of a number of leading urban Republican newspapers, Harper's Weekly, and to a much lesser extent the Nation, Richardson concludes that it was not only racism but, even more importantly, fear of worker radicalism that shaped main stream northern reaction to black southerners' aspirations. In six chapters and an epilogue that take the reader from 1865 to the turn of the century, Richardson points out that while many northern Republicans continued to sympathize with African Americans who projected a positive image of hardworking self-reliance (Richardson does not deal with gender imagery), over time they came to identify African Americans generally with un-American labor radicalism. Ultimately "The Un-American Negro," as she titles her final chapter, came to embody all the fears "mainstream" Americans had of class conflict and proletarian revolution—"the face of 'communism' or 'socialism'" (244)—and this explains the discrimination they faced in the first half of the twentieth century. It is not clear that she intends so extreme a conclusion, but her relentless stress on northern class fears suggests that class conflict precipitated post-war northern racism.

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