Portents and Parallels

...You could argue that Washington's intention clearly was not to offer a rationale for separation, but to advance the social and financial welfare of African-Americans...

...he was worried about the impact of leveraging the government to a small group of bankers who stood to profit handsomely...

...Brands, who teaches history at Texas A & M University, has occasionally been characterized as a mere synthesizer or popularizer because he writes clearly enough for a general audience...

...Cleveland balked...

...Wisely, no effort is made to settle the issue, merely to explore it: "Washington's concern for the masses of black people might have inclined him toward accepting affirmative action...

...To cite one example, The Reckless Decade conveys the megalomania of Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy with the delicious tidbit that the printer of his best-selling book, Rough Riders, was rumored to have run out of type pieces for the capital letter "I...

...Of course, not everyone was thriving in the land of opportunity, as Brands does not fail to note in his next chapter on "How the Other Half Lived...

...Using the reports of reformer journalist Jacob Riis, the author takes the reader on a tour of tenement life in the slums of New York City...

...author, "Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide " "FIN DE SIECLE," murmurs a wit in Oscar Wilde's fin de siecle novel The Picture of Dorian Cray, eliciting the response, "Fin du globe...

...Yet their shrewd telling diminishes the need for explication...

...government following the Panic of 1893, when a rush to redeem paper money dangerously depleted the Treasury's gold supply...

...Also presented are some intriguing speculations on how the two intellectual leaders of the African-American community in the 1890s, Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, might have differed over today's affirmative action policies...

...Aside from the money made by Morgan and friends, the successful bailout underlined the uneasy reliance of democracy on the power brokers of the business world...

...But the need to act quickly or face default forced him to cave in...

...Characteristic traits like individualism, practicality, inventiveness, egalitarianism, even democracy, were indeed seen as evolving out of the frontier experience...

...Brands' second chapter, aptly titled "In Morgan We Trust," describes the burgeoning of American capitalism, especially the making of famous fortunes by industrial and financial barons John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan...

...Assessing William Jennings Bryan, the so-called "silver-tongued orator" who was William McKinley's Democratic challenger, he remarks: "Though his youthful good looks appealed to many women, this didn't do him much good since women couldn't vote...

...Without education, knowledge of English, or a real understanding of American democracy, they were forced to rely on the benevolence of social workers like Jane Addams, and on the slick politicians of Tammany Hall as well as other political machines...

...That is invariable...

...In an era that witnessed the publication of Sigmund Freud's Studies on Hysteria, the founding of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the discovery of the X-ray, the birth of Babe Ruth, and the death of Friedrich Engels, America was busy annexing Hawaii, taking the Philippines under its patronage, and becoming the wealthiest nation on earth...

...Thus the soon widespread concern that without the political and cultural revitaliza-tion each move westward had afforded, the United States would lose its vigor...

...The idea that a century's final decade strands us "between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born," as Matthew Arnold had put it years earlier, haunted the mind of America in the 1890s—much the same as it does ours today...

...It was, after all, during the 1890s that the United States began its ascendance...

...The founder of Tuskegee Institute raised his hand with his fingers spread wide and proclaimed of the white and black races: "In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet as one hand in all things essential to mutual progress...

...Still, the author's point stands...

...Later chapters cover the effect of the Progressive and Populist movements on the economy and on race relations...

...In his Epilogue the author observes that in the fin de siecle "there were lots of facts" regarding America's future, and they were often contradictory: "America went to hell in a hand basket after the 1890s...

...Brands has a gift, too, for pulling together several issues of the day with one-liners...

...A number of intriguing ironies of the Jim Crow South are highlighted, among them that "it was an African-American who probably did more than any other single individual to render segregation acceptable to the American public...

...That the country overcame the gloom afflicting the final decade of the last century is, says Brands, a reflection of its resilience...

...Granted, hisprolific output?0 works on subjects ranging from the U.S...

...then again, his elitist soul would have rebelled at the thought that he or others of the talented tenth [of African-Americans] needed help from government or anyone else...

...On another front, Thomas A. Edison and George Westinghouse were involved in a battle to set the standard for delivering electricity...

...He begins his exploration of the nation's melancholic soul-searching by examining Frederick Jackson Turner's increasingly shared 1893 lament for the vanishing frontier...

...Nevertheless, the author acknowledges, there "is something about the end of a century that sets people to thinking about their collective prospects and ultimate destiny...

...An example of their ingeniousness was Morgan's bailout of President Grover Cleveland and the U.S...

...The strategy boomeranged: New York State decided to use electrocution as capital punishment and ordered the "juice" for its electric chairs from Westinghouse...

...That is comforting, since he thinks the essential economic, political and social concerns of the 1990s bear a startling similarity to those of 100 years ago...

...Turner believed that "meeting point between savagery and civilization" provided the "most rapid and effective Americanization...

...Edison, eager to prove that his low-voltage direct current system was safer than Westinghouse's high-voltage alternating current scheme, wired stray cats and dogs to powerful generators so the public could see them fry...

...role in the Philippines to the Cold War to relations with India, Yugoslavia and Egypt to the Vietnam War—tends to be longer on anecdote than analysis...

...In his extremely well-written history, H. W. Brands attributes this sense of impending doom more to anxiety than rational fear...

...They were easy prey for demagogues like Tammany's "King Richard" Croker, who built his power and popularity on his appeals to young men...

...If you get the young men," he once told the British journalist William Stead, "you get their fathers and their elder relations...

...This is a reference to Booker T. Washington's so-called "Atlanta Compromise," articulated in an 1895 speech...

...Morgan suggested that the government enter into a private contract with a syndicate he offered to head up that would immediately purchase $50 million in government bonds, and be granted an option on another $50 million...

...Far more important than the sometimes petty rivalry between the two men, though, was the fact that their genius placed America at the forefront of a technological revolution that would transform not only oil companies, steel mills and Wall Street, but daily life throughout the country...

...The rest of The Reckless Decade, however, shows how new, albeit less literal, frontiers replaced the old...

...it also went to heaven in an airplane...

...The limited universe of recent immigrants revolved around their efforts to get by...

...Edison grouched that murderers now faced being hanged or " Westinghoused...

...On the other hand, his emphasis on self-help and his comparative apathy toward politics would have disinclined him to look to government for black advancement...

...Du Bois' confrontational streak might have demanded affirmative action as a recompense for centuries of discrimination...