It's easy when reading American history to get clustered around antebellum/Civil War books and World War II/postwar literature, so it's always a treat to read something covering the surprisingly turbulent era between the Civil War and the first World War. McGerr isn't quite as dramatic storyteller as David McCullough or Doris Kearns Goodwin, but he brings some interesting theories to the table about how the progressive movement contributed both widely accepted reform as well as ill-advised societal changes. For example we generally like government entities like the FDA and the National Park Service, but ideas like Prohibition and segregation ultimately didn't sit too well with future America. McGerr illustrates progressivism as a struggle against the individualism, fueled by a growing middle class growing increasingly concerned about the misguided ways of the "upper tenth" (in reality the "less than 1%") and the working classes. Finally McGerr studies how future programs such as the Great Society and Reagan Revolution were relatively "disappointing" (for good or ill) on how much they delivered on their promises relative to the Progressive Era.
One extra note: there are two excellent pictures worth looking at in the book. One is J.P. Morgan taking a swat at a paparazzo (when the notion of celebrity was starting to bloom) and the other is a horrified, exhausted Woodrow Wilson, staring directly at the end of an era.
(linked images courtesy of the Library of Congress via Ancient Faces and Corbis Images respectively, presented here in thumbnail for no commercial purpose)
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