The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865–1915
(Bloomsbury, $30)
“It’s not every day—it’s not every year— that a book appears that upends all the guiding historical views of the age,” said David Shribman in The Boston Globe. For any middle school graduate who remembers the period between the Civil War and World War I as a dull parade of Gilded Age tycoons and indistinguishable muttonchopswearing politicians, Jon Grinspan’s “engaging, inviting” account of those years will be an eye-opener. Americans in the early post–Civil War decades were on the make and on the move. Voter participation and partisanship were at all-time highs, and political violence common. Grinspan brings the era to life by weaving in the story of a “remarkable” lawmaker, William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his reform-minded daughter, Florence. The result is a boisterous tale “devoid of the clichés and cloying generalizations of textbook history.”
Given the age’s fierce partisanship, “it’s hard not to see echoes of our current politics,” said Michael Barone in The Wall Street Journal. But Grinspan also shows how 19th-century politics was mass culture of a different sort, routinely featuring events that looked more like spectator sport or even gang warfare, with white men—the nation’s voters—taking to the streets with torches and brickbats. The city of Philadelphia, we learn, experienced gunfire during every election between 1870 and 1900. From that melee rose Kelley, a local boy of humble means, who, in Grinspan’s words, “shouted