The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 by Richard White (review)

The Republic for Which It Stands is the latest in the Oxford History of the United States series. Its predecessors included such landmarks as James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988) and Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (2007). It is every bit their equal as scholarship and literature. Some readers may find it thornier going, though. McPherson crafted a shapely narrative largely by leaving a lot out—nearly everything between 1848 and 1865 that did not involve sectional conflict and the struggle over slavery. Richard White leaves out a whole lot less about the subsequent thirty-one years. He covers expected topics—the expansion of industry and agriculture, immigration, southern land and labor, racial and political struggles, big business and great strikes. But readers will also find baseball, birth control, life insurance, and social thought. As in his earlier work, White writes with authority about native peoples, railroads, and the West. But he seems equally comfortable discussing steelmaking and coal mining, politicking in the Midwest and Northeast, changes in American Judaism, and, in an especially powerful chapter, the environmental and health crises besetting America's largest cities. Because it comprehends so much, though, the narrative moves forward not so much like a locomotive as a mile-wide herd of grazing bison.

But there's more claw and quill here than hoof and hide. White never displays the unalloyed enthusiasm for certain protagonists that Howe showed for Whigs or McPherson for Union armies. Instead, his sharp observations skewer just about everyone. White treats corporate titans and big-shot politicians roughly. They are usually venal but also often hapless. But he does not let the "antimonopolists," whom he clearly prefers to plutocrats, off the hook for their grim Sinophobia or sexism. He makes welcome use of William Dean Howells as his "chief scout" (874) to the period—but also itemizes Howells's deficiencies as a novelist.

White tells a generally downbeat tale. Republicans assumed in 1865 that the Civil War had secured a "free-labor republic of independent producers" (855). Citizens would enjoy a uniform set of rights, guaranteed by the federal government, and equal opportunity undergirded by freedom of contract. But by 1896 the United States was instead a Jim-Crowed, poll-taxed, monopolized republic of wage workers and debt-ridden farmers, few of whom could achieve free labor's promise of economic independence. Though their nation had been transformed by technology and was far wealthier in the aggregate, Americans ended up shorter in both height and lifespan than they had been before the war. "By the standard markers of health and well-being," White writes, "life had grown worse, not better, for most Americans" (793–794).

A number of organizing ideas draw this teeming account together. White plays with periodization. His Gilded Age of crooked politicians and corrupt businessmen does not follow Reconstruction but begins at the same time—in 1865. But his Reconstruction ends well before the Gilded Age does. Some historians have touted a "long" Reconstruction, in which black southerners continued after 1877 to wage a vigorous politics, sometimes at the ballot box and always through their churches, fraternal groups, militias, and emigration societies. But White is more interested in Elliott West's notion of a "Greater Reconstruction"—a common project of establishing federal sovereignty, free-labor economies, uniform citizenship, and patriarchal households in both the South and the West.

Any work that treats the South and West as a piece will have plenty to say about Texas, with its history of cotton and slavery but also its vast plains, international border, and native peoples resisting white encroachment. White sees Greater Reconstruction in Governor James Throckmorton and General Phil Sheridan's 1867 fracas over whether federal soldiers should protect white Texans...