Fables of the Reconstruction

Jack Beatty's Age of Betrayal I have to say, was a thoroughly enjoyable and engrossing read. Mr. Beatty, who demonstrates his probity, erudition and understanding time and again on NPR's On Point, easily imports these virtues into writing. His is politically inflected historiography in the best sense, comparing favorably to Marxian British historians of previous generations like E. P. Thompson and Gareth Stedman Jones. For the author, what is past is incontrovertibly prelude, and his treatment of the Gilded Age offers the perceptive reader as many insights into his own historical moment as of historical ones.

To his credit Mr. Beatty wears his learning and convictions lightly; the polemic is always subtle, never heavy-handed, and is seamlessly integrated into the prose; the gusto with which he tackles his subject proves infectious. Some chapters, such as those treating the rise and spectacular collapse of the Populists, and the labor unrest at the Carnegie steelworks, have a tragic sweep to them that will leave only the most jaded eye unmoist. As one who studies late-nineteenth century British literature, I really have to credit the author with deepening my understanding of events on this side of the Atlantic during the same period.

I do, however, have two quibbles with the text. First, the author's prose style, while generally graceful, does show a proclivity toward terseness, as well as Chicago-Manual economy of punctuation, which sometimes make even more formidable the dense thickets of data the author frequently drops his reader into. Second, while in the main Mr. Beatty confines himself to the period stated in the book's subtitle, 1865-1900, he does at times look forward to FDR's New Deal, and offers as a coda some words of Woodrow Wilson's in 1913. What the author fails to discuss in his small leap forward into 1913 is another significant event of that year, the creation of the Federal Reserve, a puzzling omission given that Lincoln's greenback paper currency and the free-silver of the Populists occupy such important places in his narrative.

Puzzling because the Fed did exactly what Lincoln did, and what the Populists proposed: replace metal-backed currency with fiat. The only twist -- and a critical one, keeping with the theme of betrayal -- is that the power of fiat was removed from government and placed in the hands of private bankers through legislation drafted by representatives of the reviled caesariat of robber-barons. This, I think, is perhaps the greatest single greatest betrayal, ensuring as it does that the everyday wage-worker will lose around three percent per annum the value of his labors' fruits -- and it is one the author never mentions. I'd be interested to hear how the author would defend the creation of the Fed as an innovation on what was proposed by the free-silver folk, whom Beatty, following Milton Friedman, claims would have triggered inflation of low-double digits. Thus I'm led to ask: Is the steady, inexorable march of three-percent inflation preferable to that which the free-silverers would have engendered? Is it simply the rate of the progression that makes the former palatable? To me, this is like saying the prisoner condemned death by lin chi died before the thousandth cut, and therefore did not die by lin chi.

These are of course ancillary considerations, and they do not prevent me from recommending Age of Betrayal as an instructive, entertaining read. I also recommend Louis Menand's magnificent The Metaphysical Club for discussion of another dimension of the same era.