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“There is incredible variability in how we have used our democracy, with plenty of room for ugliness without apocalypse, and for reform without utopia.” Jon Grinspan
The preamble to the Constitution begins: “We the people of the United States in Order to form a more perfect Union…” The emphasis is on “more.” The Founders never claimed to have formed a “perfect” Union, but one better than those that then existed. Also, in providing a process to improve and adjust the Constitution amendments were permitted. In fact, the first ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) were ratified on December 15, 1791. In the subsequent 230 years, seventeen additional amendments have been ratified. Our democracy is not static; it adjusts, not easily but judiciously, as customs and behaviors change. Jon Grinspan has given us, who now live in a new age of political strife, a well-written – albeit brief – informative look at the fifty years following the Civil War – a time of political acrimony.
The time span covered by Mr. Grinspan – 1865 to 1915 – begins with the assassination of Lincoln and a Country emerging from the Civil War; it ends with the United States having surpassed Britain as the world’s largest industrial power. He takes us through Reconstruction and how it petered out, with violence in the South against blacks and with the North having given up on the concept of equal rights. We travel through the “Gilded Age” when fortunes were made in railroads, mining, oil, steel, electricity, shipping, newspapers and finance, and when former farmhands, women and children were recruited to work in city sweat shops and factories, where they performed low-paying, mind-numbing (often dangerous) repetitive jobs. His story ends with the reforms of the “Progressive Era.” In the early post-Civil War period, the public wanted the entertainment that political campaigners provided: “They expected charisma and wit and the hottest-burning fuel of the era: political outrage.” During these fifty years, we saw eleven Presidents, high voter turnout and two Presidents assassinated, Garfield and McKinley. Voter turnout peaked in the election of 1896 at 79.5%. Twenty-eight years later it troughed at 48.8% in 1924. While Republicans dominated the White House during the fifty years covered by Mr. Grinspan, elections were always close. The only two Presidents to be elected with more than 53% of the popular vote during that period were Ulysses Grant in 1872 and Theodore Roosevelt in 1904. Presidential election winners in 1880,1884, 1888, 1892 and 1912 won with less than 50% of the popular vote.
