Jon Grinspan, according to his bio, is the curator of political history at the Smithsonian, and it’s obvious that he has spent more than a little time in the archives. This book is an account of American political history between the Civil War and the First World War. If anything the wars seem a little tame by comparison.
Grinspan uses a Republican congressman, William Kelley, as our way into his narrative.
Kelley placed himself on the radical fringe of the Radical Republicans of 1865, a rare supporter of abolition, women’s rights, workers’ rights, and many other unusual, crankish causes. He had spent the past few years sharing stages with his friend Frederick Douglass and mentoring Anna Dickinson, an electrifying twenty-year-old “girl orator.”
…he consistently managed to be noisily on the vanguard, attracting piles of adoring, bemused, or hateful commentary. People just loved to to write about the guy.
Which can only be a gift for the historian. Kelley was kind of the Forest Gump of his era.
Over his many years in Congress, Will Kelley became beloved, hated, “almost better known throughout the world than any other man in American public life.” Somehow, this single individual shook Andrew Jackson’s hand in 1833, informed Abraham Lincoln that he had won the Republican nomination in 1860, helped the transcontinental railroad link America in 1869, wrote the bill guaranteeing voting rights for men of all races in 1870, proposed the creation of Yellowstone as America’s first national park in 1871, organized America’s centennial celebration in 1876, reshaped America’s industrial economy in the 1880s, and helped dedicate the State of Liberty in 1886.
To say nothing of getting stabbed and shot at by anti-abolitionists every now and then.
Kelley’s daughter, social activist and suffragist Florence, follows in her father’s footsteps, without much real choice in the matter. A sickly child, her mother kept her home from school and her father took up her educational slack.
Florie’s first memory of the “strange, incoherent process of my education” began when she was seven years old. Her father presented her with a “terrible little book” about child labor in England. He sat with her, flipping through page after page of terrifying engravings of gray little children bent under heavy loads of bricks.
Florie grows up, goes to Cornell, gets married, and, fleeing an abusive husband, heads west with her children, arriving in Chicago in 1891 two days after Christmas.
Illinois had notoriously liberal divorce laws, and Chicago had a reputation as a hotbed of inequity and activism.
A town made for Florie, who got a job at Jane Addams’ Hull House and spent the rest of her life writing, speaking and advocating for suffrage, fair labor practices and against child labor. She was friends with everyone from Louis Brandeis to W.E.B. Du Bois and Frances Perkins. She was a member of the board of the nascent NAACP.
For her boldness, her antiracism, her socialism, and her unrestrained desire for answers, Florence Kelley “paid in bitter dislike, in determined misunderstanding, and in the loss of nearly every reward that smug respectability and calculated conformity bring,” Du Bois wrote with admiration.
I’ll say. Will died in 1890, Florie in 1932, and we are all living today in the country they helped build. And you will be amazed by how exact the parallels are between railroads then and AI now.
I saw an interview with Grinspan in which he said, “The shared driving force between the Gilded Age and today is recklessness.” The Age of Acrimony is a two hundred seventy-two page proof of thesis. There are extensive notes, a lengthy biography, and many people behaving just as badly then as they are today. If he and Peter Leyden et al are right and we as a nation repeat ourselves every eighty or so years, we can expect a new Progressive Era any minute now. Good read.