"Provocative....A perceptive reading of the current zeitgeist."—Michael Kazin, 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
"Sweeping and ambitious....Fraser weaves together a rich tapestry of history, statistics and barely suppressed outrage."—Maura Casey, Washington Post
"Fascinating....As Fraser forcefully shows, during the first Gilded Age American elites were threatened with more than embarrassing statistics."—Naomi Klein, New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
"Delivered with real verve....Like Marx in the Communist Manifesto and Thomas Piketty's Capital, butfrom an American perspective, Fraser writes majestically if not almost poetically about the making of capitalism."—Harvey J. Kaye, Daily Beast
"Fraser is particularly passionate and penetrating in his analysis of our present state of submission and surrender. His intention is not just to chronicle the change but to explain why it happened."—Jon Wiener, Los Angeles Times
"A sharp-edged, completely fascinating look at American history and the contemporary politics of the haves and have-nots."—Vanessa Bush, Booklist
"Fraser's work shines as an angry but cogent denouncement of America's growing wealth disparity. Highly recommended."— Library Journal
"An absorbing, vigorous account of class politics....an excellent, very readable recreation of an authentically American form of working-class militancy and its eclipse."—Publishers Weekly
"Fraser leads the reader on a fascinating and relevant journey." —Brian Tanguay, Santa Barbara Independent
"A cutting study of how American workers lost the will to battle for their well-being. It took decades to get ourselves into this mess. It's going to take decades to get out of it. Fraser makes that all too clear in a book that deserves to spark a national conversation." —Michael Causey, Washington Independent Review of Books
"No one writing history today does it with the power, passion, insight, and rigor of Steve Fraser. In The Age of Acquiescence, Fraser reaches back a century to the first Gilded Age and then pushes forward into our own Gilded Age, providing his readers with a history that matters, that informs, and that, most critically, raises essential questions we should all be asking about wealth, power, and inequalities in America today."—David Nasaw, author of The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
"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
"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
"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
"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
★ 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
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.
