The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power

by Steve Fraser

Overview

A groundbreaking investigation of how and why, from the 18th century to the present day, American resistance to our ruling elites has vanished.

From the American Revolution through the Civil Rights movement, Americans have long mobilized against political, social, and economic privilege. Hierarchies based on inheritance, wealth, and political preferment were treated as obnoxious and a threat to democracy. Mass movements envisioned a new world supplanting dog-eat-dog capitalism. But over the last half-century that political will and cultural imagination have vanished. Why?

The Age of Acquiescence seeks to solve that mystery. Steve Fraser's account of national transformation brilliantly examines the rise of American capitalism, the visionary attempts to protect the democratic commonwealth, and the great surrender to today's delusional fables of freedom and the politics of fear. Effervescent and razorsharp, The Age of Acquiescence is provocative and fascinating.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780316333740
Publisher:	Little, Brown and Company
Publication date:	02/17/2015
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
File size:	911 KB

About the Author

Steve Fraser is the author of Every Man a Speculator, Wall Street, and Labor Will Rule, which won the Philip Taft Award for the best book in labor history. He also is the co-editor of The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Nation, the American Prospect, Raritan, and the London Review of Books. He has written for the online site Tomdispatch.com, and his work has appeared on the Huffington Post, Salon, Truthout, and Alternet, among others. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

Introduction 3

Part I Class Warfare in America: The Long Nineteenth Century

1 Progress 25

2 Progress, Poverty, and Primitive Accumulation 39

3 Premonitions 68

4 The Second Civil War: In the Countryside 88

5 The Second Civil War: On the Industrial Frontier 107

6 Myth and History 145

7 The End of Socialism 179

Part II Desire and Fear in the Second Gilded Age

8 Back to the Future: The Political Economy of Auto-cannibalism 223

9 Fables of Acquiescence: The Businessman as Populist Hero 264

10 Fables of Freedom: Brand X 302

11 Wages of Freedom: The Fable of the Free Agent 324

12 Journey to Nowhere: The Eclipse of the Labor Movement 341

13 Improbable Rebels: The Folklore of Limousine Liberalism 375

14 Conclusion: Exit by the Rear Doors 408

Acknowledgments 423

Notes 427

Index 453

What People are Saying About This

Greg Grandin

Over the last few years, there's been a wealth of books describing our new Gilded Age and bemoaning the extreme economic inequality that now defines modern America. Steve Fraser's fascinating The Age of Acquiescence is indispensable because it explains how that happened, how America's long standing opposition to concentrated wealth was defeated. Steve Fraser, in other words, is Thomas Piketty with politics, providing a crucial guide in helping the ninety-nine percent understand the terms of their defeat and, more importantly, how it can once again go on the offensive. --Greg Grandin, author of The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World and Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City

Frances Fox Piven

Steve Fraser has given us a sweeping account of the economic and cultural changes in American society that combined to create an earlier era of working class struggle and hope, and then in our present moment have generated quiescence and despair. Read this book for its synoptic account of the ways that cultural manipulation have accompanied intensifying economic exploitation. But read it also to snatch glimmers of a better future from the past. --Frances Fox Piven, author of Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America

Lewis Lapham

A splendid and illuminating book. Fraser's writing is clear-headed and free of cant. I know of no better an accounting for the division of America over the last forty years into a minority of the terrified rich and a majority of the humiliated poor. --Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham's Quarterly and author of Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration

Eric Foner

Steve Fraser is that rare writer who combines a deep knowledge of history with a penetrating analysis of our current political and social condition. Here, in the lively prose that marks all his writing, he probes the similarities and differences between America's two gilded ages — the late nineteenth-century and today — offering provocative observations about why the first produced massive popular resistance and the second resigned acquiescence. --Eric Foner, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery

Editorial Reviews

11/10/2014
Nowadays Americans just say yes to inequality and exploitation, argues this spirited history of anticapitalist sentiment in the United States. Historian Fraser (Every Man a Speculator) starts with an absorbing, vigorous account of class politics during the late 19th-century Gilded Age, a time of mass strikes, revolutionary agitation, utopian socialist yearnings and fierce denunciations of robber barons among workers, and violent repression and apocalyptic alarm among elites. He then contrasts that era with the post-Reagan “second Gilded Age,” when ordinary people have seen incomes erode, work hours lengthen, economic security dwindle, and corporations run riot, yet have uttered, he argues, hardly a peep of protest. Less focused than his remembrance of 19th-century resistance, Fraser’s take on modern acquiescence scolds capitalist ideologies and cultural tropes—the businessman as populist hero, consumerism as freedom itself—for imparting false consciousness. Many of his analyses, like his diagnosis of right-wing populism as a rebellion of “family capitalism,” are incisive, but he ignores important prosaic factors, like the disastrous record of 20th-century socialist economies, in the waning of utopian left-wing enthusiasm. Still, this is an excellent, very readable recreation of an authentically American form of working-class militancy and its eclipse. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Fascinating."—NaomiKlein, New York Times BookReview (Editor's Choice)

"Fraser longs for the passion and force with which Americans of earlier generations attacked aggregated power."
—Jill Lepore, The New Yorker

"Provocative....A perceptive reading of the current zeitgeist."—MichaelKazin, Slate

"Fraser offers a sweeping, forcefully argued comparison between, on the one hand, the economy, ideology, and politics of the first Gilded Age and, on the other, the contemporary political scene."—Kim Phillips-Fein, Atlantic

"Fraser is our preeminent historian of America as a capitalist civilization. No one is more attuned to the inner vibrations of our monied culture...[he writes] a prose of sinuous beauty."—Corey Robin, Salon

"Fraser is particularly passionate and penetrating in his analysis of our present state of submission and surrender."—JonWiener, Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

★ 01/01/2015
In this comparative history, Fraser (Every Man a Speculator; Labor Will Rule) contrasts the Gilded Age with post-Great Recession America and wonders why there hasn't been more protest against growing wealth disparity. The author explains how 19th-century industrialization caused immense social disruption. Resulting worker backlash, he writes, brought about the legislation and contractual agreements that both curbed capitalism's excesses and created prosperity for most Americans by the 1950s. Fraser takes a dystopian view of the last few decades when he says the export of jobs and investment eviscerated American industry, collapsed cities, shortened life expectancy, and created downward social mobility. He ascribes the general acceptance of the current economic order to factors including the media, consumer culture, job competition, an erosion of worker rights, declining unions, and the fragmentation of the working class. VERDICT Fraser's work shines as an angry but cogent denouncement of America's growing wealth disparity. It is highly recommended to all readers as a complement to Thomas Piketty's study of wealth inequality, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. [See Prepub Alert, 8/11/14.]—Lawrence Maxted, Gannon Univ. Lib., Erie, PA

Library Journal

2014-12-07
Working men and women died for the eight-hour workday, and the thanks they get is the silence of lambs. It wasn't long ago, writes labor historian Fraser (Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life, 2005, etc.), that "the labor question" was a matter of incendiary discussion. The 19th century saw countless efforts, for instance, to create a balance of industrial and agricultural enterprise, many of them based on a post-Jeffersonian notion of empowered freeholders and independent producers. The market economy that emerged instead was likely to beget inequality and poverty, before "the antiseptic, mathematical language of risk assessment and probability analysis made that seem overly sentimental." Taking his narrative through the Jeffersonian era and the first Gilded Age to the present, Fraser charts a steady diminution of workers' rights and the value of labor. He can be a little heavy-handed, especially when pillorying Ronald Reagan: "the Great Communicator's reign…unleashed torrents of mercenary greed." Some readers may find this off-putting, but others, used to a diet of Chris Hedges, may well find it exhilarating instead. Fraser's careful analysis of the rise of the "rentier society" of that time helps make up for rhetorical excess, and especially useful is his look at how the anti-usury laws of old gave way to a time of financial deregulation, which allowed for an all-out assault on the wallets of those who lived on credit. And surely Fraser is right when he notes the damaging effects of false consciousness, as when even the labor movement insists on being seen as representing the middle class "in a studied aversion to using a social category—the working class—that fits it well but is now so stigmatized that it is better left buried." A welcome though overly broad-brushed excoriation of the age of the ascendant 1 percent.

Kirkus Reviews