Every summer I enjoy plopping into my beach chair facing the ocean right at the high tide mark and burying my attention into to some hardcover history or biography from the library.
Now and then, but not often, am I interrupted by a curious beach stroller drawn by the large-font titles that cannot help but draw attention from that modest distance–as they are designed to do in bookstores after all.
A Wicked War (2012) caught the attention of some wag who joked, “Which one?” as if to call the title redundant. The Road to Camelot (2017) drew a man my age who was tearfully grateful for the chance to wax nostalgic about the Kennedys. Shooting Midnight Cowboy (2021) drew two women, one of them who had long resisted the other’s urging that she see the 1969 classic film, the other eager to have me endorse her cause.
And then there was the geezer who pounced on the sight of Coolidge (2014) as a chance to expound on Silent Cal’s “the business of America is business” and its glorious manifestation in the Reagan years. When I suggested that he seemed oblivious to the Great Depression that resulted from Coolidge’s administration, as well as the beginning of the end of the middle class caused by Reagan’s deregulation and dismantling of America’s industrial base, he blathered on, denying any cause/effect relation between what those two presidents did and the consequences that followed.
Hey, it was my beach day. And I’m too old to suffer fools, even if I am one. I told him to do something anatomically impossible. Since then, he has walked past but never stops.
If he walked by this week, it had to be tempting to stop for The Age of Acrimony.
I’ve noticed others drawing a bit closer as they go by, as if to confirm a title they can’t quite believe. This is not unusual, except that for other books they continue to walk in stride, moving back toward the beach as smoothly as they angled in toward me.
Something about the word “acrimony,” however, that makes them recoil, and the move back toward the surf is noticeably abrupt.
Too bad the subtitle is not as prominent: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915. Though the book is history and not how-to, we might better understand the torchlight parade in Charlottesville and intimidation at polling places by knowing that both were common campaign practices until the advent of the enclosed polling booths in 1896.
We might better understand recent Republican efforts to restrict access to the polls in cities by knowing that the decades-long Temperance movement was aimed, not so much at alcohol per se, but at the places where campaign workers talked up potential voters, often immigrants, always men just off from a factory shift who had little other exposure to news.
The Anti-Saloon League’s real intent was so effective that it had widespread support in rural America and away from inner-cities from people who continued to imbibe. Indeed, its advocates boasted of its “Secret Cause” to keep Italians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews–citizens or not–from voting. All in the name of sobriety.
Author Jon Grinspan’s summary is something I’ve never seen or heard from any American historian:
States with large working-class immigrant populations like New York, Pennsylvania, and Illinois hung onto their saloons, but many others shut down a key political institution, and with it the working-class vote in those states plummeted. These victories built upon themselves in a vicious cycle: by closing the chief site of working-class political assembly, states made it more difficult for laborers to resist further prohibitions. Rather than a newly mobilized anti-alcohol vote, what was really happening was the suppression of votes of saloon supporters. The passage of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920, prohibiting the sale of alcohol nationwide, represented both the apogee, and the consequence, of the movement to push the working-class from politics.
Of all the histories I’ve ever read, Acrimony wins the “Not What You Always Thought & Were Ever Taught” Award. Another huge surprise: Teddy Roosevelt, for all his personal dynamism, was a calming force for the nation. Too calming for Florence Kelly, a life-long writer and activist for the working class, women’s suffrage, and especially regulations of child-labor.
Florrie Kelly–daughter of iconoclastic Pennsylvania Rep. William Kelly, early cohort of legendary Chicago social-worker Jane Addams, and a friend, mentor, and ally of Frances Perkins, a chief architect of the New Deal–is one of numerous forgotten Americans brought to life in Acrimony.
Others who breathe hope into the raucous decades the book spans–and who would serve us well today–include “muckrakers” William Demarest Lloyd and Lincoln Steffens, “girl orator” Anna Dickinson, and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Icons such as Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass become real on Grinspan’s pages and are better off for it. The irascible Roscoe Conkling, for all his faults, offers a way to understand the allure of bipartisanship and the need to insist on principle.
Even Charles Guiteau is brought to life–not just as deranged assassin of President James Garfield, but as one of many who believed that to work on a campaign entitled you to a government job if your candidate won. Patronage is a main theme of Acrimony. More than anything else, the campaign discord and violence that it caused was answered with civil service reform–prompted by activists and muckrakers–that gradually began under Grover Cleveland and took hold under Teddy Roosevelt.
But as much as anyone else, despite his brief appearance in the book, Guiteau foreshadows America’s 21st Century turn back into campaign discord and violence. He “couldn’t handle torches,” writes Grinspan, but “when Garfield won, Guiteau knew ‘I was on my way to the White House’.”
In context, it’s impossible to read that and not think of Charlottesville, January 6, and so much that went between.
Don’t know whether to be glad or disappointed that my anatomically impossible friend did not stop to inquire about Acrimony. I doubt that it would have eased the acrimony between us, but I’d gladly give up an afternoon’s relaxation on the beach to hear him answer one question:
“Is this the time invoked by the ‘again’ on your red cap?”
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Mouth of the River 