How America sold its soul in the 'Age of Betrayal'

Beatty offers an angry look at the corporate greed and racism of post-Civil War America.

from the May 22, 2007 edition

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Race is the other central theme in Beatty's story. The efforts to grant equality for freed slaves made uneven progress until the Compromise of 1877 put Rutherford Hayes in the White House and removed federal troops from the South.

Violence against the freedmen soon followed, but efforts to penalize the perpetrators stumbled largely because the Supreme Court significantly undercut the reach of the 14th and 15th Amendments. While these laws were clearly passed to help the former slaves, the Court sharply limited the ability of the federal government to enforce them. At the same time, the Court extended the due process protections of the 14th Amendment to corporations and thereby insulated them from state regulation. Beatty calls this "The Inverted Constitution": The Court helped corporations escape regulation at the same time that it failed to help those citizens most in need of government protection.

Enormous disparities were commonplace. The well-to-do lived extravagantly, and the poor struggled in unimaginable circumstances. Beatty quotes a letter Andrew Carnegie sent to a friend: "Ashamed to tell you profits these days. Prodigious!" Shortly afterward, the workers at Carnegie's Homestead steel mill went on strike over a proposed wage cut. The strike turned violent, and troops were brought in to suppress it.

Beatty weaves together a wide range of disparate themes into a strong narrative. He uses short biographies as a way of showing the role that individuals played in moving the nation's political, economic, and legal center of gravity.

He has conducted a vast amount of research, much of it based on the work of distinguished historians such as Eric Foner and C. Vann Woodward. But the reliance on extensive quotes comes at the sacrifice of smooth reading. [Editor's note: The original version misspelled Mr. Foner's last name.]

"Age of Betrayal" is not the dispassionate analysis of a professional historian; it conveys the opinions and outrage of an essayist mourning the lost opportunity to create a fair and open society. And Beatty believes that history is repeating itself. Like many observers, he fears the increasing income disparities of our own era herald a "New Gilded Age."

• Terry Hartle is a senior vice president with the American Council on Education in Washington, D.C.

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