Summary
Chapter 28: A Progressive America
At the end of the 19th century, Republicans were increasingly aware that poor voters posed a problem for them. They proclaimed that poor men asking for better working and living conditions were “socialists” and would undermine the economy and thus the comforts that the wealthy enjoyed. Republicans argued that the incredible innovations the economy was experiencing were due to the freedoms afforded to businessmen, such as favorable tariff laws, a lack of worker protections, and a lack of regulation.
This was a "reworking of the worldview of elite enslavers, updated for the era of industrialization” (222). The “robber barons” argued that individualism, private property, accumulation of wealth, and competition were the heights of human achievement, and those men who achieved this made the world a better place. It did not matter that their workers suffered, as they were able to open libraries, art collections, and universities to benefit the country. Republicans did their best to control tariff laws and get their own elected to office. The vision of the nation as one in which only a few wealthy men ruled was seeming to come to fruition.
But in the 1890s, a new political movement began to take shape. It was composed of workers and farmers and small businessmen in western towns, who realized they were similarly dismayed about the way the government did not seem to work for them. They began to come together, publishing their own newspapers and pamphlets and educating people through gatherings, letters, barbeques, and lectures. They explained complicated things such as railroad rates and demanded direct election of senators and other reforms. This was the revival of an older tradition of “manliness,” meaning honesty, generosity, community-mindedness, and dignity.
This burgeoning movement was successful in the midterm elections of 1890, gaining many state and local seats. In 1892 the reformers coalesced as the Populist Party. They warned of businessmen bringing the country to ruin and the unfairness in the way millions were treated. Voters agreed, returning the Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. The Populist ideology even began to influence a new generation of younger Republican politicians, who realized that the excesses of wealth and the disparities in the government's treatment of Americans of the Gilded Age was no longer tenable.
By 1898, these younger Republicans were joining Democrats to advocate helping the Cubans in their revolution against Spanish colonial power. Theodore Roosevelt and others like him reworked liberalism and rebranded the American cowboy. Roosevelt "emphasized that his men [the volunteer Rough Riders who were going to fight in the Spanish-American war] came from every part of the country and from every walk of life” (227). The new cowboy represented a new America and when Roosevelt became president, he took that image into the government itself.
Before spreading its democratic and capitalist vision abroad, the country needed to clean up its system at home. Progressives knew that protecting individual rights meant that a strong government had controlled business and regulated social welfare. This was finally a bipartisan conviction, and Progressives from both parties regulated monopolies, instituted consumer protections, helped add the 17th amendment (direct election of senators) to the Constitution, and implemented a myriad of other reforms at the local, state, and federal levels.
Chapter 29: The Road to the New Deal
Progressives were able to expand some rights and protect others, but they were not really focused on racial equality. That didn’t mean that no one was doing that in the early 20th century, however—this was when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was formed.
The Democratic Party acknowledged that the “expanding demographics of the late nineteenth century had left the principles of the southern extremists behind” (233). They began to focus on the northern, urban, and multicultural wing of the party. They may have still been worried about too strong of a federal government and favored local control, but they did not care as much about white supremacy.
In New York, the Tammany Hall political apparatus led by Charles Murphy had moved away from the illegal behavior that characterized the machine for decades and was trying to figure out how to keep its working-class voting bloc. James Farley, another powerful member of Tammany, became a kingmaker in the Democratic Party. He helped the Catholic, working-class Al Smith become the governor of New York and supported his presidential run. He supported women’s rights and created a powerful coalition of women, Catholics, Blacks, and workers.
This was the New Deal coalition, and it was immensely impactful. Democrats passed laws regulating business, creating a social safety net, creating jobs, and promoting infrastructure. This liberal consensus continued through Truman and Eisenhower, and the economy experienced a “great compression" during their presidencies, as the gap between rich and poor decreased. After WWII, the G.I. Bill helped millions of men get jobs, attain low-cost mortgages, and attend college. Unions helped solidify the power of laborers. The middle class became larger and more stable. Incomes doubled and affluence was abundant.
Black and Brown people were excluded from some programs of the New Deal in order to curry favor with Southern Democrats, but the era suggested that “Black Americans, people of color, and women should have a say in their government and its benefits, however imperfect the early days of that expansion turned out to be” (236).
Chapter 30: Democracy Awakening
Since the 1980s, political figures have been denigrating the liberal consensus that worked so well for so many people. Thanks to the activism of Black and Brown Americans, the nation had figured out what democracy really meant. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s resulted in many successes, such as the Civil Rights Bill of 1964 that outlawed segregation and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which protected the right to vote that the 15th Amendment should have been enough for. President Lyndon Johnson spoke passionately about how Americans of all races fought for their country and its ideals, how they were the real adherents to the principles set forth in the Declaration of Independence. He emphasized how the Civil Rights Bill did not take away anyone’s rights but instead respected everyone’s rights equally. The purpose, he said, was not to divide but to end divisions.
This was the vision of his Great Society, the name for LBJ’s slate of domestic policies that would improve the lives of all Americans. Johnson and his Democratic majorities in Congress created Medicare and Medicaid; Head Start, preschool for low-income children; the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities; National Public Radio and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting; the Water Quality Act; and the War on Poverty slate of programs. These programs changed America, reducing the poverty rate almost by half and helping people of color achieve more equity with white Americans. Women were in the labor force in higher numbers than ever and gained protections for contraception and abortion.
Opponents of the Great Society gained seats in the 1966 midterms in both the House and the Senate, but “the nation seemed poised to embrace its multicultural history” (242). However, in 1980 Ronald Reagan continued the divisive rhetoric of Nixon and ran on a platform of government being the problem, not the solver of problems, and won with 50.7% of the vote.
Conclusion: Reclaiming our Country
The dismantling of the liberal consensus was the revival of a trend toward authoritarianism, which was resulting in wealth concentrating upward and Republicans claiming that dispossessed Americans were at fault for their own disenfranchisement and struggles because they’d let lazy minorities and women take too much and rig the system. Many thought the government could no longer defend their interests and those who still did “found the Republicans had increasingly diluted their votes through gerrymandering, voter suppression, the filibuster, and the Electoral College” (246).
Joe Biden was elected in 2020 and set about trying to restore traditional American values and expand the liberal consensus. He and the Democrats passed historic legislation that echoed that of FDR and LBJ. Biden also knew that democracy at home needed to be helped by strengthening democracy abroad, so he rejoined the World Health Organization, strengthened NATO, and helped Zelensky in Ukraine.
Even though democracy was defended by Biden, Trumpism did not go away. Establishment leaders still supported Trump, as did the majority of the Supreme Court. Though Trump was in a tremendous amount of legal trouble, the radicalized Republican Party supported him and focused on numerous methods to get their agenda out there. Through focusing on book bans and attacks on “critical race theory,” they created a “history that looks back to a mythologized past as the country’s time [which] is a key tool of authoritarians" (251).
Richardson concludes by stating that the Founders’ hopes have never been fully proven right but they’ve never fully been proven wrong. We are again at a time of testing.
Afterward
Richardson notes that this new edition is coming out during the 2024 campaign for the presidency. She explains how Trump and his MAGA supporters doubled down on their authoritarian vision. Trump was successful in pushing out anyone who wouldn’t stand next to him at all costs, reinforced the Big Lie of the stolen election, and undermined faith in the justice system. The Supreme Court give Trump unprecedented, unconstitutional immunity. His supporters flooded the media with culture war talking points, further embraced violence, and embraced the Heritage Foundation’s thousand-page plan of Project 2025 which “stood on what its authors saw as a Christian program ending abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and non-traditional families, in addition to dismantling the administrative state, isolating the United States from the rest of the world, and installing an authoritarian leader who would control the Justice Department, the military, and the civil service” (261).
Richardson takes the reader right up to the moment when Kamala Harris took over the nomination from Joe Biden, but she does not know the outcome of the election at the point of this edition’s publication. She ends with a quote from Lincoln about the “fiery trial” that we must pass through and which will end with "honor or dishonor” (264).
Analysis
In this final collection of chapters, conclusion, and afterward, Richardson brings the story of American democracy to a close and offers her thoughts on where we are going and what we can do about it.
She chronicles the rise of the farmers and laborers who formed the Farmers’ Alliance and Populist Party, the young Progressive Republicans, and the coalition of voters who elected Franklin Roosevelt and supported the formation of the liberal consensus. She takes that liberal consensus from the 1930s into the 1960s, when it reached new heights with Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Importantly, even though the story is told using the framing of presidents and administrations, she is foregrounding the work of ordinary Americans to identify the limitations of democracy and call for its expansion.
In the conclusion, she explains how Biden also built upon and expanded the liberal consensus, but Trumpism did not go away (admittedly, another valid critique of the text is that she does not mention the Biden administration’s and increasingly elitist Democrats’ missteps). Looking back to Lincoln, she says that, crucially, even though in Lincoln’s time democracy appeared to have won, “the Americans of Lincoln’s time did not root out the hierarchical strand of our history, leaving it there for other rising autocrats in the future to exploit with their rhetoric and the fears of their followers” (253). This has left us with a situation in which “the hopes of our Founders have never been proven fully right. And yet they have not yet been proven entirely wrong” (252).
This is a “time of testing” (253), Richardson writes at the end of the conclusion, and she again echoes that sentiment with the end of her afterward, “The Last Best Hope,” which brings the reader to the few months before the election of 2024. She quotes Lincoln talking about not being able to escape history and how what we do now will be looked on as honorable or dishonorable. This puts the power in our hands, a sentiment that, while it does not seem to give Richardson an outsized amount of hope, does offer at least some. She said in an interview that “one of the things that I think people miss nowadays when they are frightened about what's happening--and heaven knows we should be frightened--is the fact that all the new voices we're hearing, all the new music, all the new art forms, all the new ways of looking at organizing the economy, for example, all the new approaches to climate change, those are times in which we are sort of throwing all the cards up in the air and what comes down really depends on what we, the people, decide what we want to have the next version of our country be.”
In another interview, she offered a similar assessment in answer to the interviewer’s request for final thoughts and predictions about American democracy: “I was thinking the other day about the way people talk about this country. And it seems to me it comes down to whether or not you have faith in people or you don't. Do you have faith that ordinary Americans will make good decisions or not? And I certainly know a lot of people in whom I don't necessarily have a lot of faith in. I think we probably all do, but at the end of the day, I think people are basically good and people basically make good decisions taken as a whole. So, I think at the end of the--it's not really a prediction, but, I think my faith is on the side of those people who want to protect American democracy.”
