02/10/2020
This exhaustive and politically minded history of St. Louis, Mo., by Harvard history professor Johnson (Soul by Soul) indicts the city’s treatment of its minority residents. Opening with the 1804 Lewis and Clark Expedition, which set out from St. Louis and led to the forcible removal of Native Americans from their lands, Johnson details Missouri’s admission to the U.S. as a slave state; the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which originated in St. Louis; and the emergence of ragtime music from the “barrooms and bordellos” of the city’s Deep Morgan district. In later chapters, he explores how the redevelopment of the city’s riverfront and the construction of the Gateway Arch in the 1960s displaced black residents, and argues that the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, Mo., and the unrest that followed “exemplif the history of structural racism” in the region. Johnson makes a persuasive case that “St. Louis has been the crucible of American history,” and his celebration of the city’s defiant black culture heightens the book’s potency. Progressive readers interested in African-American and Western history will savor this incisive and troubling account. (Apr.)
"When it comes to the history of racism and exclusion in the United States, St. Louis wasn't unique...what it was, Johnson says, was more extreme.... Johnson is a spirited and skillful rhetorician, juggling a slew of historical facts while never allowing the flame of his anger to dim.... As he ably shows, so much exploitation lies in the details."—New York Times
“Johnson’s insistence on rooting today’s racism in yesterday’s conquest of indigenous people and enslavement of kidnapped people from Africa makes The Broken Heart of America a book for our times.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
"Readers of The Broken Heart of America will never view the history of the region the same way again."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"The Broken Heart of America is an outraged dissection of a malignant pattern Johnson discerns in the way white St. Louis treated Native Americans and then Blacks.... Comprehensive and convincing in its particulars."—Boston Globe
“Beginning with the imperial dreams of William Clark and ending with the protests and freedom movements of organizers in Ferguson, Johnson encapsulates America’s dreams and contradictions."—Smithsonian
"An impressive mix of scholarly detail and anecdotal liveliness...Enlightening."—American History
"In his compelling and enlightening book, Johnson connects past and present, calling for a reexamination of urban life and the fundamental problems of this most American of cities."—National Book Review
“A grim history that details the triumphant expansion of a virulent and violent racialized capitalism.”—Dissent
“Johnson sets American history on fire.”—Provincetown Independent
“A riveting analysis...Insightful.”—Missourian
“Johnson's research is thorough, the indictment compelling and well written...An unsettling but necessary compilation.”—Illinois Heritage
“Through the lens of racial capitalism and empire building, Johnson helps explain how we got to this point.”—The Christian Century
"A fascinating read...Vital to understanding how we have gotten to the point we have."—The Common Reader
“Highly recommended."—Choice (American Library Association)
“Although focused primarily on the history of St. Louis and surrounding areas, this well researched and thoroughly documented work is too important to be dismissed as a strictly regional history. Highly recommended for all readers interested in American history.” —Library Journal
"Johnson approaches St. Louis with the interpretive tools of his work on the intersection of American capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy. He vividly describes its neighborhoods, personalities, and historical conflicts while emphasizing how segregation, disinvestment, and race based economic extraction eventually set the stage for Ferguson.... An important warning to not ignore the rotten spots in the country's foundation."—Booklist
“In his careful analysis of the ways in which violence created white wealth, Johnson joins a large body of scholars, including Robin Kelley and Lisa Lowe, studying racial capitalism…In St. Louis, the twin legacies of slavery and the Indian Wars have combined to brutal effect: Whether by exile, murder, or exploitative labor, wealth has been extracted from black and indigenous people.”—Bookforum
"This book is a magisterial history of the emergence and development of racial capitalism and the rise and decline of American empire examined through the lens of St. Louis. The complex dynamics of eviction, extraction, and exploitation as well as resilience and resistance are laid bare from the indigenous city of Cahokia in the eleventh century (larger than then London) to St. Louis, a frontier post and later metropolis of the US western empire. From ruling class elites Thomas Hart Benton and Harland Bartholomew and oppositional artists Kate Chopin and Tef Poe to black and socialist insurgents, The Broken Heart of America tells the best story of America that we have in the spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois. Walter Johnson is one of our very few great US historians!"—Cornel West
"Walter Johnson has written a magisterial book. Using the sordid history of St. Louis, he weaves a tale of violence and betrayal — a story of the removal of peoples and the taking of land by force and by zoning — that helps the reader understand the glaring contradictions that define the United States today. Even the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 must be understood against the backdrop of the long history of greed, extraction, and racism that shaped the city of St. Louis and this country. The Broken Heart of America isn't a dispassionate treatment of historical facts: Johnson has written a searing history that matters deeply to him, a native son, and it should matter to all of us."—Eddie S. Glaude, author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own
"Gateway. Ghetto. Ground Zero. Blues. This is St. Louis, unmoored from myths and exposed by one of our finest historians. Walter Johnson finds in this romanticized and reviled city the nucleus of racial capitalism and American empire and a story of dispossession, disaster, extraction, containment, and death — lots of death. A heartland broken, but not a heartless tale, for it is here we discover Black, Brown, and Native communities with heart, workers with heart, organizers fighting to bring justice to the heart of the city and the nation. After reading this book, you will never think of St. Louis or U.S. history the same way."—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
"The thread that runs through this entire book is the historical relationship between US imperialism, Indian removal, and anti-Black racism. Although also a granular history of the city of St. Louis, The Broken Heart of America is a deep history of the United States' continental empire with St. Louis at the center of economic and military operations. This may be the most important book on US history you will read in your lifetime."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
"Walter Johnson's latest is a masterpiece that both haunts and inspires: at once a personal reckoning; a sweeping 200-year history of removal, racism, exclusion, and extraction; and a story that powerfully lifts up the human beings who, in 2014, stood together in Ferguson to demand accountability for the layered injustices that have so scarred not just one city — but America itself."—Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy
"When it comes to understanding the power dynamics that sparked the Ferguson Uprising in St. Louis, this is absolutely the most important book you'll read. Walter Johnson has a Baldwin-esque ability to describe the raw emotions of Black life in the city. With stories heartbreaking yet riveting — told by someone brave enough to share them — he exposes the history of white supremacy and capitalism, class struggle and race, and Black rebellions both before and after Ferguson. In the era of fake news and mock revolutions, this book is the truth."—Tef Poe, musician, activist, and cofounder of Hands Up United
07/01/2020
In this latest work, Johnson (River of Dark Dreams) examines St. Louis as a case study for a compelling reinterpretation of American history. From appropriation of Native American lands by Europeans to 21st-century police violence, the city's history is viewed through the lens of racial capitalism, described by Johnson as white supremacy plus empire, extraction, and exploitation. Johnson explains how, in the history of St. Louis, racial capitalism is evident in the violent resistance to biracial labor organizing in the early 20th century, in midcentury zoning laws and restrictive covenants that enforced residential segregation, and in more recent corporate tax incentives that decimated state and local government budgets. Though presented chronologically, Johnson effectively traces the continuous threads that run through this history, comparing 19th-century Indian removal to 1960s urban renewal, and an antebellum murder of a free Black woman to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson. VERDICT Although focused primarily on the history of St. Louis and surrounding areas, this well researched and thoroughly documented work is too important to be dismissed as a strictly regional history. Highly recommended for all readers interested in American history.—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
★ 2020-01-26
A Harvard professor of history and African American studies posits that studying the history of St. Louis can help explain more than 200 years of racism and exploitation in the U.S.
“This book,” writes Johnson, a Missouri native, “traces the history of empire and racial capitalism through a series of stages, beginning with the fur trade in the early nineteenth century and following all the way down to payday lending, tax abatement, for-profit policing, and mass incarceration in our own times.” In a narrative of unrelenting, justified outrage grounded in impressive scholarship, Johnson proceeds mostly chronologically. He begins in early-19th-century St. Louis, a city that served as a base for a violent white-dominated government and military, which murdered Native Americans in massive numbers, with impunity, while driving them away from their long-established homelands. After the eradication of Native communities, they turned their violent intentions toward black communities. Many of those black residents had lived in metropolitan St. Louis for generations; tens of thousands more had arrived from the Deep South hoping to escape the aftermath of slavery. Instead, they encountered a slavery of sorts based on low-wage employment; segregated, substandard housing, transportation, and schooling; and frequent emotional and physical violence. Johnson explains the nature of structural racism, including how it flows naturally from rampant capitalism. Although occasional passages qualify as theoretical—and may only appeal to fellow historians—every chapter includes searing, unforgettable examples. White men often portrayed as heroes are shown by Johnson to be bigots, including Lewis and Clark and Thomas Hart Benton, but the author also exposes plenty of unsavory characters who will be unknown to readers without a familiarity with St. Louis history. Johnson offers plenty of evidence from the current century, as well, including the police murder of Michael Brown in the suburb of Ferguson. The epilogue offers hope, however minimal, that residents can imagine “new ways to live in the city, to connect with and care for one another, to be human.”
A well-rendered, incisive exploration of “a history of serial dispossession and imperial violence."
