Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (Harper: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010)
Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Unlike Skowronek who approached the history of this period in terms of the formation of a new American state, Jackson Lears, an expert in interpreting American cultural history, examines the American history of this period from the perspective of rebirth. Before publishing Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920, Lears has already published several monographs on American cultural history. In No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920, taking Englishmen John Ruskin and William Morris and their American disciples as case studies, Lears examines aesthetic radicals and the humane alternatives to consumerism that gradually shifted from social justice to ideals of therapeutic personal fulfillment. Moreover, in Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, he explores the exploitation of that hunger for "authenticity" that resulted from the earlier process. Based on these works on American culture, he furthers his understanding of American culture and history in his new book ─ Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920.
In this book, Lears discusses the transformations America underwent in the half century's journey since the Civil War. Before him, there are several classics in interpreting American history in this period. In The Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (1955), connecting the populism, progressive movement and the New Deal together, Richard Hofstadter discusses how the American history is in an age of reform. Taking reconstruction as a good lens to understand the American history since the Civil War, in Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (1988), Eric Foner talks about how the reconstruction failed and its impact on the African Americans. Both Hofstadter and Foner greatly help us to understand the American history in this period. However, unlike them, Lears describes his book as a “synthetic reinterpretation” of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and attempts to challenge their authority in this field. He argues:
All history is the history of longing. The details of policy; the migration of peoples; the abstractions that nations kill and die for, including the abstraction of ‘the nation’ itself ─ all can be ultimately traced to the viscera of human desire. Human beings have wanted innumerable, often contradictory things ─ security and dignity, power and domination, sheer excitement and mere survival, unconditional love and eternal salvation ─ and those desires have animated public life. The political has always been personal.[1]
For Lears, the American history between the Civil War and World War I was a period dominated by personal longings. According to him, “personal longings become peculiarly influential in political life; private emotions and public policies resonate with special force, creating seismic change. This was what happened in the United States between the Civil War and World War I.”[2] Therefore, the historical writing of the American history could be based on the personal longings.
With Rebirth of a Nation, he discusses the militarist fantasies of rebirth through violence, war and empire in this period. Beginning in the 1870s, he points out, Americans attempted to stitch their country back together around a “militarist fantasy” of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. However, their efforts produced tragedy. White mobs in the south attacked the slaves who were emancipated by the Lincoln government and endowed their legitimate rights in the 13th, 14th and 15th constitutional amendments. In the west frontier, the Federal troops massacred a large number of unarmed Indians at Wounded Knee; in East Asia, at the beginning of the century, U.S. commanders in the Philippines killed American civilians there who resisted the U.S. imperial claims.
Lears also mentions the major trends of the age: the rise of industrial capitalism, the expansion of American empire, the tightening chokehold of Jim Crow. “The rise of total war between the Civil War and World War I was rooted in longings for release from bourgeois normality into a realm of heroic struggle,” he writes. “This was the desperate anxiety, the yearning for rebirth that lay behind official ideologies of romantic nationalism, imperial progress and civilizing mission — and that led to the trenches of the Western Front.”[3] Reinterpreting American history in terms of longing and rebirth, Lears captures the features of the psychic crisis of the United States.
In interpreting the making of the modern America, Skowronek and Lears both contributed a lot to our understanding of the history in this period. Skowronek mainly focused on the state-building and its transformation in American history, Lears pays more attention to the rebirth of a new nation. The former was greatly indebted to the historical sociologists in the 1970s and 1980s, like Charles Tilly, Barrington Moore, and Theda Skocpol and so on; the later was greatly influenced by the cultural turn of American history. Both rebirth and state-building are goods lens, however, for those who don’t like imagine, fantasy, personal longings, Lears’s book might be a little difficult for them to read his book. As for Skowronek’s book, for those who wants to understand American history through culture and anecdotes, it might be a little boring to read a book which just focuses on army, administrative capacity and civil services. Anyway, state-building and rebirth offer them two perspectives to approach American history in this period. Both of them are very provocative and challenging. After all, different historians have their different points of view in understanding American history.
[1] Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (Harper: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010), 1.
[3] Lears, ibid, 8.
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