The USA has a long history of upheaval and change. The Progressive Era, one that we 21st-century beneficiaries tend to forget existed, was the cradle of such social justice as FDR was able to jam down the gullets of the horrible, nasty conservatives that have always dominated American politics and continue to do even today, to our lasting shame.

The Jeffersonian ideal of an agrarian democracy died about 1840. Industrialization, in those early years, went on in a brutal, hideously cruel way (much as the conservatives have enabled to go on in China, Indonesia, etc, with their "unfettered flow of capital to benefit the masses" bullhockey). The 1880s came as a crisis point: Would untrammelled capitalism be allowed to kill millions without so much as a peep from those suffering from its ravages, or would the laborers whose efforts *made* all that money finally demand some of it for themselves?

The Bloody 80s began. The highly minimal social democracy that the conservatives can be forced to endure had its genesis then, and survives...battered, diminished, mocked and reviled by the jeering apes in their never-enough-profit packs...thanks to the blood and sacrifice of those forgotten ancestors.

Painter's book is a careful, complete, and even-handed narrative of what happened and why during this important turning point in the formation of the country we all love. It made me long to live a long enough life to see the tide of history come back in, washing away the institutionalized greed and stupidity that exemplify Congress and the many state governments. The book is a history...but in the right hands, teachers, it could become a call to arms.... ( )