Originally published in 1960 by Walter Lord
First published 2011 by Transaction Publishers
Published 2017 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2010045279
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lord, Walter, 1917-2002.
The good years : from 1900 to the First World War / Walter Lord.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York, Harper, 1960. With new introd.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-4128-1830-8 (acid-free paper)
1. United StatesHistory--1901-1953. 2. United StatesSocial conditions20th century. 3. United StatesCivilization. 4. United StatesBiography. I. Title.
E756.L68 2011
973.91--dc22
2010045279
ISBN-13: 978-1-4128-1830-8 (pbk)
Leslie Lenkowsky
In 1890, a comedy by Ernest Blum and Robert Toche opened at the Theatre du Gymnase in Paris. It was titled Paris, Fin de Siecle. A New York Times reviewer called it essentially Parisian, because no one ... could understand it. Punch was more favorably disposed toward the subsequent London production, judging it amusing and well worth seeing, though adding that it is not quite clear what fin de siecle means.
The play has long been forgotten, but the mysterious phrase in the titleits first appearance, according to etymologist Ernest Week-leyhas lived on. It is used to refer to the end of a century or an era, and usually connotes a time of decadence, or despair, coming after a period of progress and abundance. France and Austria at the conclusion of the nineteenth century are the classic examples.
But not the United States. As Walter Lord shows in The Good Years: From 1900 to the First World War, the gloom and resignation that could be found in the Old World as the twentieth century began was not to be encountered in the New. To the contrary, Lord portrays the United States during this period as a nation brimming with confidence because, whatever the trouble, people were sure they could fix it (ix). Even European observers of that era noticed the difference. In 1906, the German sociologist, Werner Sombart, produced a classic effort at trying to understand American exceptionalism: Why is there no Socialism in the United States?
Originally published in I960, The Good Years was an unusual book for Lord. A lawyer by training and a veteran of the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War, the Baltimore native had been working as a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in 1955 when his second book, A Night to Remember, a dramatic account of the sinking of the Titanic, appeared. It became a best-seller and enabled Lord to devote himself full-time to writing. Most of his books were about famous military encounters, such as Midway, Pearl Harbor, Dunkirk, and the Alamo, and were written in a style that made readers feel as if they were present as events were unfolding. Others dealt with Commodore Pearys struggle to reach the North Pole and the civil rights confrontation involving James Meredith at the University of Mississippi. The Good Years was his fourth book, and the only one in which the setting was mostly peaceful.
Nonetheless, typically for a Lord book, it contains plenty of heroes. In a series of vignettes on each year from 1900 to 1914, readers can watch Theodore Roosevelt, leading a charge for economic and social reforms with the same vigor he showed at San Juan Hill; the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk, launching a flying machine while hardly anyone noticed; a host of San Franciscans, refusing to let the 1906 earthquake and the fires that followed destroy their city; the elderly and ill J.P. Morgan, almost single-handedly staving off yet another financial panic; Harriet Stanton Blatch and other suffragettes, boldly parading down New Yorks Fifth Avenue in quest of the right to vote; George Schuster, overcoming breakdowns and rivals to win the great New York to Paris car race; the professorial Woodrow Wilson, going from Princetons campus to the White House with the critical support of the populist, William Jennings Bryan; and many more.
Lord chronicles the gala balls and European travels of the wealthy, including their departure on the ill-fated maiden voyage of the Titanic. And he depicts the bad-blood and treachery of the formative years of the labor movement through the trial of Big Bill Haywood and other union leaders, accused of conspiring to shoot a former governor of Idaho. The trial featured an epic courtroom battle between Clarence Darrow for the defense and silver-tongued, future Senator William E. Borah for the prosecution, which Darrows side eventually won, according to Lord, thanks to an honest jury and conscientious judge (178).
Perhaps the most fascinating and least familiar episode in The Good Years recounts the campaign to ban child labor. In 1913, reports Lord, 20 percent of American children were working, often for little pay and under poor conditions. Since President Wilson believed the Federal government lacked the authority to do anything, reformers had to convince state legislatures to act, a tough proposition in places such as Georgia, whose numerous textile mills relied heavily on children. Lord describes how they eventually did so, attributing their success to a great moral awakening that was underway in the United States:
Ordinary people in every walk of life felt a growing sense of social responsibility. It was not so much a political movement as a purely humanitarian revolt against poverty ... a warm-hearted crusade for a finer, cleaner life. (329)
For Americans, in Lords view, the debut de siecle was a period of growing confidence and higher expectations that held out the hope of even greater triumphs ahead.
However, on the same day in 1914 that the Georgia legislature approved a bill ending child labor, he adds, German armies invaded Belgium and the lamps, in the words of the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, were going out over Europe (341). Eventually, the wars darkness would blanket the United States as well, and with it came, writes Lord, a loss of optimism, confidence, exuberance, and hope (342). He ends his chronicle there, but on an upbeat note: People had seen the spark before, would surely do so again (342). However, for the rest of his life, which ended in 2002, Lord mostly wrote books about battles and struggles.
Was Lords portrait of the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century an accurate one? There are some seemingly important omissions. The Good Years mentions only in passing the influx of immigrantsover 12 million between 1900 and 1913which may have been the most significant development of the period, changing forever American society and culture. Nor does it address the continued deteriorationfollowing the 1896 verdict in Plessy v. Fergusonin the legal protections afforded blacks, including a 1904 Supreme Court decision that upheld efforts in Alabama and other states of the former Confederacy to disenfranchise them. (Although Lord amusingly relates the hazards presented by the growing use of automobiles, he fails to note that in1900, nearly as many people were lynched as died in car crashes.) While just 40 percent of the population lived in urban areas at the beginning of the twentieth century, and still less than half ten years later, small-town and rural America are mostly invisible in
