Book Reviews 243

The Rise of Industrial America

By Page Smith

New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1984,966 pp., $29.95.

Reviewed by Dale R. Howard, Cameron University

It is difficult to fully review such a lengthy book with 45 diverse chapters. Smith’s tone deals with American history roughly between the years 1876 and 1901. It begins with the conquest of the Plains Indians and ends with the first U.S. intervention overseas, the Spanish-American War and its aftermath.

In between is a rich panorama of American life. Each chapter is a piece of ethnography that can be read alone or in the context of the whole narrative. Virtually everything is covered: the new muckraking journalism; the birth of the first comicstrip (“Yellow Kid”); collegiate and professional sports (the former was so brutal that President Theodore Roosevelt had to intervene); the conditions of women, blacks, immigrants, the rich and poor; the rise of the trusts and unions; chapters on religion, education, and literature, and much more.

Despite its diversity, two themes emerge from this book: the rise of Darwinian science and the conflicts between capital and labor. Many members of academia (most notably William Graham Sumner) played the role of ideological missionaries, placating the “natives” to the new science of Drawinism. Now capital accumulation could be justified by appealing to the “objective” nature of things. Sumner argued that neither the rich nor the government had any obligations to the social good; in fact, intervention to ameliorate social problems would just produce dependency, laziness, and heightened expectations. The Robber Baron era was unleashed with a new, seemingly unassailable base of support: science.

Darwinism was also called upon in the war between capital and labor, particularly to suppress, brutally if necessary, any and all demands of the “dangerous classes” of workers, primarily industrial foreign workers. The capitalist ideology was that these “dangerous classes” were inferior beings who needed rigid control in the “wholesome atmosphere of the steel mill and the coal mine”and should be happy to accept any wages their employers chose to give them. Jay Gould offered his solution to the “labor problem”; dare “one half of the working class to kill the other half.”

Smith calls himself a “narrative historian” committed “to viewing history through the eyes of the men and women who made it.. . ” He is a master at this. His book is chock full of marvelous quotes and vignettes, many of which I noted for future reference. Page Smith writes about historical events as Studs Terkel writes about contemporary ones.

Smith accomplishes two tasks with The Rise of Industrial America. It is a valuable learning experience that happens to be a pleasure to read. I recommend it highly.