The Politicos, 1865-1896
About this book
Out of print for decades, The Politicos , Matthew Josephson’s sequel to his instant classic, The Robber Barons , is even more resonant indeed, cautionary a historical account today than it was when first published seventy years ago. Written during the most desperate time in twentieth-century America, this biting chronicle of the Gilded Age confirmed in most Americans minds why they had voted overwhelmingly for FDR and had embraced the New Deal’s reforms. In his insightful introduction to this volume, Michael Kazin notes that Josephson was able to convince readers living through the worst of the Great Depression that the roots of their calamity could be traced to the power and greed so notorious at the end of the last century. The eminent American historians Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward both lauded Josephson’s book. Hofstadter called it by far the most illuminating book on the politics of the entire period, while Woodward described it as masterly. For a contemporary reader, however, what is most disturbing about Josephson’s work is how closely it seems to be related to the alarming facts of American life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. At a time when income inequality in the United States is by every measure the worst it has been since the Great Depression, it is clear why Thomas Frank writes that The Politicos is "the volume of history with the most to teach us about the present."