Summary
A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.
From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why?
The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.
Author Notes
Steve Fraser is the author of Every Man a Speculator , Wall Street, and Labor Will Rule , which won the Philip Taft Prize for the best book in labour history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order . His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times , the New York Times , The Nation , The American Prospect , Raritan , and the London Review of Books . He has written for the online site Tomdispatch.com, and his work has appeared on the Huffington Post , Salon , Truthout , and Alternet , among others. He lives in New York City.
Publisher's Weekly Review
Nowadays Americans just say yes to inequality and exploitation, argues this spirited history of anticapitalist sentiment in the United States. Historian Fraser (Every Man a Speculator) starts with an absorbing, vigorous account of class politics during the late 19th-century Gilded Age, a time of mass strikes, revolutionary agitation, utopian socialist yearnings and fierce denunciations of robber barons among workers, and violent repression and apocalyptic alarm among elites. He then contrasts that era with the post-Reagan "second Gilded Age," when ordinary people have seen incomes erode, work hours lengthen, economic security dwindle, and corporations run riot, yet have uttered, he argues, hardly a peep of protest. Less focused than his remembrance of 19th-century resistance, Fraser's take on modern acquiescence scolds capitalist ideologies and cultural tropes-the businessman as populist hero, consumerism as freedom itself-for imparting false consciousness. Many of his analyses, like his diagnosis of right-wing populism as a rebellion of "family capitalism," are incisive, but he ignores important prosaic factors, like the disastrous record of 20th-century socialist economies, in the waning of utopian left-wing enthusiasm. Still, this is an excellent, very readable recreation of an authentically American form of working-class militancy and its eclipse. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Why did the Occupy Wall Street movement, seen as the rambunctious protest against the nation's second Gilded Age, vanish so suddenly and completely? And what does its disappearance say about our ability to recognize and rebel against inequality? Fraser (Every Man a Speculator, 2005) examines these compelling questions as he contrasts the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century and our latest era of inequality. Among his observations: the earlier protests against wealth and power came from a population new to capitalism and outraged by its excesses, unlike our generation, long familiar with capitalism. Fraser notes that the earlier age was a time when industrialization was sweeping the nation, unlike the present, with its lack of industrialization. Americans then were frugal and hardworking; now they are spendthrifts satisfying every impulse with borrowed money. Fraser also explores the difference between a time when the Left rose up against the powers that be and now, when the Right's Tea Party rails against the government but supports capitalism. All the while, he raises the most compelling question, Is capitalism compatible with democracy, as the U.S. has always asserted? This is a sharp-edged, completely fascinating look at American history and the contemporary politics of the haves and have-nots.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
SPINSTER: Making a Life of One's Own, by Kate Bolick. (Broadway, $16.) The author examines her lifelong quest for independence, weaving in the stories of female writers whose lives inspired her along the way. In their quests for solitude, Boiick and her heroines find pleasure in the alternatives to a familiar sequence: "You are born, you grow up, you become a wife." MY STRUGGLE: BOOK 4, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) The fourth volume of Knausgaard's six-part autobiographical novel finds 18-year-old Karl Ove newly arrived in a remote Norwegian village to teach and hone his writing. The narrative follows him as he works toward adulthood, with digressive ruminations on his adolescence, hopes for a girlfriend and youthful ambition. AMERICAN WARLORD: A True Story, by Johnny Dwyer. (Vintage, $17.) Dwyer tells the story of Chucky Taylor, the son of Charles Taylor, the former Liberian leader whose legacy of violence still scars the country. Chucky was largely neglected by his parents during his childhood in Orlando, but after a visit to Liberia in the 1990s, he joined the cycle of violence and torture there, and killed for sport during the civil war. THE UNFORTUNATES, by Sophie McManus. (Picador/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) CeCe, the aging heir to a rubber fortune, is sent away to a sanitarium by her son and enrolled in an experimental drug trial, leaving him free to pour the family's wealth into a comically disastrous opera. For all the trappings of a familiar WASP story, CeCe's unexpected generosity and wit give this debut novel "its remarkable maturity and heft," Britt Peterson wrote here. THE MILLIONAIRE AND THE BARD: Henry Folger's Obsessive Hunt for Shakespeare's First Folio, by Andrea E. Mays. (Simon & Schuster, $16.) Mays, a historian, traces one wealthy American's impassioned quest to purchase as many copies of the First Folio, the crucial collection of Shakespeare's plays published in 1623, as he could. Over his lifetime, Folger amassed a holding of more than twice the number of the copies known to exist in England. GIRL AT WAR, by Sara Novic. (Random House, $16.) Ana Juric, this novel's protagonist, was 10 years old when the violent breakup of Yugoslavia reached her hometown, Croatia's capital. The ensuing horrors, on both a national and personal level - Ana's parents were killed, and she was conscripted as a child soldier - leave her as the "sole repository of family memory," Anthony Marra wrote here. THE AGE OF ACQUIESCENCE: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power, by Steve Fraser. (Basic Books, $18.99.) The current economic chasm in American society amounts to what Fraser sees as a reprisal of the Gilded Age, with a difference: 200 years ago, inequality mobilized citizens to protest, while today that impulse has stalled. Fraser investigates why.
Choice Review
This elegantly written book, the latest in a long line of important studies by award-winning labor historian and public intellectual Fraser (e.g., Wall Street: America's Dream Palace (CH, Oct'08, 46-1007)), has two parts. The first describes resistance, from the Gilded Age through the Great Depression, of US workers, farmers, intellectuals, and politicians to the development of large-scale capitalist enterprises, such as railroads and factories, that dispossessed Americans of land and labor to accumulate profits. This anti-capitalist action, argues Fraser, drove the policies behind the New Deal's transformation of US politics. In the second part, the author asks why, since the 1970s, Americans have largely "acquiesced" to a regime of "auto-cannibalis[tic]" capitalism built on ubiquitous credit, corporate assaults on organized labor, and global pursuit of profits by powerful financial corporations. Fraser's sweeping explanation: Americans were bought off by consumerist bounty and believed a narrative that heroic entrepreneurs saved the US economy from stifling regulations and that average Americans, in turn, enjoy more freedom in an unregulated economy. Though the implications for both present and future are bleak, few books feature such an ambitious premise or cover as much historical ground over such a complex era as skillfully as does Fraser's. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --Jon Shelton, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay
Kirkus Review
Working men and women died for the eight-hour workday, and the thanks they get is the silence of lambs. It wasn't long ago, writes labor historian Fraser (Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life, 2005, etc.), that "the labor question" was a matter of incendiary discussion. The 19th century saw countless efforts, for instance, to create a balance of industrial and agricultural enterprise, many of them based on a post-Jeffersonian notion of empowered freeholders and independent producers. The market economy that emerged instead was likely to beget inequality and poverty, before "the antiseptic, mathematical language of risk assessment and probability analysis made that seem overly sentimental." Taking his narrative through the Jeffersonian era and the first Gilded Age to the present, Fraser charts a steady diminution of workers' rights and the value of labor. He can be a little heavy-handed, especially when pillorying Ronald Reagan: "the Great Communicator's reignunleashed torrents of mercenary greed." Some readers may find this off-putting, but others, used to a diet of Chris Hedges, may well find it exhilarating instead. Fraser's careful analysis of the rise of the "rentier society" of that time helps make up for rhetorical excess, and especially useful is his look at how the anti-usury laws of old gave way to a time of financial deregulation, which allowed for an all-out assault on the wallets of those who lived on credit. And surely Fraser is right when he notes the damaging effects of false consciousness, as when even the labor movement insists on being seen as representing the middle class "in a studied aversion to using a social categorythe working classthat fits it well but is now so stigmatized that it is better left buried." A welcome though overly broad-brushed excoriation of the age of the ascendant 1 percent. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Starred Review. In this comparative history, Fraser (Every Man a Speculator; Labor Will Rule) contrasts the Gilded Age with post-Great Recession America and wonders why there hasn't been more protest against growing wealth disparity. The author explains how 19th-century industrialization caused immense social disruption. Resulting worker backlash, he writes, brought about the legislation and contractual agreements that both curbed capitalism's excesses and created prosperity for most Americans by the 1950s. Fraser takes a dystopian view of the last few decades when he says the export of jobs and investment eviscerated American industry, collapsed cities, shortened life expectancy, and created downward social mobility. He ascribes the general acceptance of the current economic order to factors including the media, consumer culture, job competition, an erosion of worker rights, declining unions, and the fragmentation of the working class. VERDICT Fraser's work shines as an angry but cogent denouncement of America's growing wealth disparity. It is highly recommended to all readers as a complement to Thomas Piketty's study of wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]-Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
