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The Media Matters: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Hunger in the U.S.

April 11, 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of a historical moment that is far more relevant today than we might wish: the discovery of hunger in the U.S. or, perhaps better put, the point in the late 1960s when severe poverty and life-threatening malnutrition in the world’s wealthiest nation suddenly soared into public view on the national political stage. This anniversary matters today not only because proposals to restructure federal food programs threaten their very viability, but also because of the role played by the media, then and now.

The very meaning of “discovery,” when it came to the politics of hunger in the late 1960s, rested in part on the production and reception of news, documentaries, visual images, and editorials that, at times, provoked explicit confrontations over who had the right and expertise to say whether starvation existed in America. The one media production that scholars have written about, CBS’s renowned Hunger in America, first broadcast in May 1968 and vividly recalled by many who watched it, is notable as much for the reactions it provoked as its content. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman denounced the program’s critique of federal food programs as “biased, one-sided, [and] dishonest.” San Antonio’s county commissioner, A. J. Ploch, reported threats on his life for his statement that Mexican American kids didn’t need to do well in school, for which they needed better nutrition, because they would always be “Indians,” not “chiefs.” Later it came out that the Mississippi congressman who headed the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee borrowed agents from the FBI to track down and survey the cupboards of every interviewee in order to prove the show had been a pack of lies. Drama over who controls truth in the media is not a new phenomenon.

Fannie Lou Hamer speaking at a hearing of Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967. Rev. J. C. Killingsworth is seated beside her. (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

On April 11, 1967, Senators Joseph Clark (D-Pennsylvania) and—famously—Robert Kennedy (D-New York) conducted a daylong tour of the Mississippi Delta that brought them face to face with residents, especially young children, who bore signs of malnutrition so severe that they could only compare them with what they had observed in Latin America and Africa. Their shock at what they witnessed triggered an ultimately victorious decade-long campaign to expand, alter, and establish the federal food programs that are in jeopardy today. Within months, investigations in locales as disparate as Kentucky, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. precipitated a cascade of further discoveries confirming that hunger was not solely a Mississippi problem.

Senators George Murphy, Jacob Javits, Joseph Clark, and Robert F. Kennedy of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, listening to testimony during a hearing in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967 (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

Kennedy and Clark had flown to the Delta from Jackson, where the day before they had heard Mississippi activists testify at a senate hearing on the War on Poverty that starvation had become a genuine threat in their counties. Fannie Lou Hamer, Marian Wright (Edelman)—then an NAACP attorney in Jackson—and others ascribed this devastating situation not only to joblessness caused by cotton mechanization but voting rights repression. County officials, they argued, used government regulations to prevent them from receiving food stamps. Back in Washington two weeks later, Clark, Kennedy, and other members of their committee released a letter they had sent to Lyndon Johnson describing their shock at witnessing malnutrition and hunger among the families they had met and urging him to send emergency food to the area. Johnson denied the request, the press reported, blaming the problem on congressional cuts to the poverty program. Hunger was not new in the U.S., nor had activists previously held their tongues, but now it arrived on the national political stage wrapped in drama and political conflict.

Daniel Schorr’s typescript for CBS News, April 11, 1967. (The Daniel Schorr Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division)

By evening on April 11, 1967, reporters and photographers had filed stories and images of the senators’ Delta tour. Daniel Schorr’s CBS Evening News report and Joseph Loftus’s New York Times article helped frame what would be cast as ground zero for the politics of hunger. Both portrayed Kennedy surrounded by enthusiastic crowds, but whereas their coverage of the previous day’s hearing had centered on the Mississippi politicians’ assault on Johnson’s War on Poverty, these stories concerned Kennedy and Clark’s critiques of Johnson from the left. Loftus reported that Clark had declined to label what he witnessed as starvation, but asserted that the deplorable conditions indicated the poverty program’s weakness. Schorr mused that RFK might have found a platform other than Vietnam, from which to challenge Johnson.

Schorr began his next report by stating: “Congress talks of poverty and how it should be dealt with, but rarely does it go to look at it.” Clark and Kennedy, however, had gone themselves “to see if the reports of starvation were true.” He described their shock at seeing “children with distended bellies” and speaking with “poor Negroes earning $6 a day for cotton chopping, and many earning nothing.” Many, Clark learned, “could not even scrape together the $2 a month to buy $12 worth of food stamps.” The senators had not spoken of “starvation,” but Schorr had. That term spurred irate Mississippi politicians to launch their own investigations to disprove its existence. Journalist didn’t invent this language—African American activists in Mississippi did that; however, they helped create the context for national controversy.

Simeon Booker

Simeon Booker covered similar ground in his article for Jet, aimed at black readers, but he made Kennedy and Clark’s Delta tour inseparable from what occurred at the hearing the previous day. This strategy allowed him to present a trenchant critique of racism in the antipoverty program from the vantage point of activists at the hearing. At a time when some journalists had begun to separate hunger from other problems the hearings had addressed, Booker took a different tack, beginning and ending with Kennedy’s responses to witnessing hunger and malnutrition but diving into economic, medical, and political challenges in between.

Others pursued feature stories that combined “behind-the-scenes” investigation, vivid language, and political insight. Robert Sherrill’s June 4 New York Times essay, “It Isn’t True That Nobody Starves In America,” took readers to Alabama and Mississippi, while slamming the beltway politicians who had structured federal food programs such that they could produce starvation as easily as nutrition. Mississippi could pride itself on having food stamp programs in more counties than elsewhere in the South, he declared, but purchase requirements meant that the poorer one was, the more unlikely one was to access benefits. Sherrill minced no words, criticizing even Kennedy for using euphemisms like “extreme hunger.”

Sherrill’s article preceded national hearings on hunger and malnutrition that Clark’s Senate poverty committee held in Washington in July 1967. People watched the hearings on television or read reports of such moments as when Senator John Stennis lit into North Carolina pediatrician and civil rights activist Raymond Wheeler. Wheeler was one of six doctors sent by the Field Foundation to investigate starvation in Mississippi and had accused white elites of trying to starve blacks out of the state. Stennis, who had his own radio program and was well aware that cameras were rolling and reporters were scribbling, accused him of “gross libel and slander.”

William Hedgepeth and Al Clayton, “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” LOOK, December 26, 1967.

Questions of proof inspired one of the most intimate and widely-read features to appear in a mass-circulation glossy magazine, Al Clayton and William Hedgepeth’s “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” which ran in LOOK’s Christmas 1967 issue. Struck by Clayton’s photographs, which Kennedy displayed at the hearings as proof of starvation, Hedgepeth teamed up with the photographer for a story about a family surviving conditions the senators described. Both white southerners — Clayton from southeast Tennessee, Hedgepeth from Atlanta — they spent days with the Pilgrims, especially with six-year-old, bright-eyed Teresa, whose photograph opens the story. Public response was off the charts for LOOK, as readers asked where to send Christmas gifts and money.

CBS’s phones began ringing off the hook five months later, even before the broadcast of Hunger in America had concluded. Viewers not only sent food and financial support to those who appeared in it, but sent letters to their representatives demanding the overhaul of food programs that the documentary prescribed. While the Federal Communications Commission weighed charges that CBS had overstepped the ethical bounds of journalism, social commentators referred to the documentary as the turning point in bringing public awareness to the crisis of hunger.

The matter of truth, including who had the right to define it, was an incendiary one in April 1967 and for months thereafter. “Starvation,” unlike either hunger or malnutrition, implied that someone or something was responsible, raising the stakes in a conflict that drew in large swaths of the public via the media. Two years later, antipoverty activists in every region were fed up with hearings and investigations; they wanted change.

Also by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity.
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

Childhood Has a History

By Steven Mintz

Why is knowledge of the history of childhood valuable?

First, because history defamiliarizes the present, reminding us that concepts, practices, and ideas that we take for granted are in fact problematic. Take, for example, the Freudian notion that early childhood determines a child’s future development, shapes their personality, and leaves a lasting imprint on their future relationships. Few thinkers would have accepted these ideas prior to the twentieth century. Thus in his 1749 novel The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, Henry Fielding dismissed the title character’s childhood in six words: “nothing happened worthy of being recorded.”

Or take the assumption that very young children are incapable of performing sophisticated chores. In most past societies, children took on work responsibilities from extremely young ages, often as young as two or three. Abraham Lincoln, for example, assisted his father in clearing fields when the future president was only two years old.

Mill children in Macon, Georgia in 1909 (Photo by Lewis Hine via Wikipedia).

Or the view popularized by attachment theorists that proper child development requires secure attachment to a single mothering figure and a stable household environment. In fact, many, and perhaps most, children in the past had multiple nurturing figures and shifted frequently among households.

Or, more controversially, consider the current medical advice that co-sleeping arrangements, where a mother and her infant share the same bed, puts the child at risk. From a historical perspective, it was highly unusual for mothers and infants to sleep apart, and even in the United States, reliance on cribs is a relatively recent development, dating to the early twentieth century. Separate sleeping arrangements for infants appears to reflect this society’s emphasis on cultivating individualism from a very early age.

Then, too, history rebuts myths and misconceptions that distort public understanding. For example, take the myth of the carefree childhood. We cling to a fantasy that once upon a time childhood and youth were years of carefree adventure, despite the fact that for most children in the past, growing up was anything but easy. Disease, family disruption, and early entry into the world of work were integral parts of family life into the early twentieth century. The notion of a prolonged childhood, devoted to education and free from adult-like responsibilities, is a very recent invention, a product of the past century and a half, and one that only became a reality for a majority of children after World War II.

Margaret Gibson (far right) described a happy and carefree childhood in her middle-class home in Scotland. This photo was taken in 1932, two months before she died of scarlet fever (via Portal to the Past).

Another myth is the home as a haven and bastion of stability in an ever-changing world. Throughout American history, family stability has been the exception, not the norm. At the beginning of the twentieth century, fully a third of all American children spent at least a portion of their childhood in a single-parent home, and as recently as 1940, one child in ten did not live with either parent—compared to one in 25 today.

Percentage of Children 0-14 living in single-parent households in 2010 (via The Atlantic).

A third myth is that childhood is the same for all children, a status transcending class, ethnicity, and gender. In fact, every aspect of childhood is shaped by class—as well as by ethnicity, gender, geography, religion, and historical era. We may think of childhood as a biological phenomenon, but it is better understood as a life stage whose contours are shaped by a particular time and place. Childrearing practices, schooling, and the age at which young people leave home—all are the products of particular social and cultural circumstances.

A fourth myth is that the United States is a peculiarly child-friendly society when, in actuality, Americans are deeply ambivalent about children. Adults envy young people their youth, vitality, and physical attractiveness. But they also resent children’s intrusions on their time and resources and frequently fear their passions and drives. Many reforms that nominally have been designed to protect and assist the young were also instituted to insulate adults from children and insure smooth operation of the economic order.

Lastly a myth, which is perhaps the most difficult to overcome, is a myth of progress, and its inverse, a myth of decline. There is a tendency to conceive of the history of childhood as a story of steps forward over time: of parental engagement replacing emotional distance, of kindness and leniency supplanting strict and stern punishment, of scientific enlightenment superseding superstition and misguided moralism. This progressivism is sometimes seen in reverse, i.e. that childhood is disappearing: that children are growing up too quickly and wildly and losing their innocence, playfulness, and malleability. Both the myth of progress and the myth of decline are profoundly misleading. Historical change invariably involves trade-offs; all progress is achieved at a price and involves losses as well as gains. We are certainly the beneficiaries of dramatic declines in rates of infant and child mortality and increased control over childhood diseases. But it is also apparently the case that more children than ever suffer from disabilities and chronic conditions than in the past.

History also refutes any simplistic linear theories about upward and onward progress and any assumptions about inevitability. One striking example involves child abuse. Although the physical and sexual abuse of children appears to have declined in recent years, other forms of abuse remain prevalent. These include the violence of expectations – the assumption that children are able to achieve certain markers of maturity before previous eras deemed them physiologically or psychologically ready; the violence of labeling – of attaching pathological labels upon normal childish behavior; the violence of representation – the sexual exploitation of images of girls in advertising; and the violence of poverty, which exposes children to extraordinary stressors and limits their future possibilities.

Children doing yoga in New York City to reduce school-related stress (Via DNAinfo New York).

In addition, history lays bare certain long-term trends, developments, and processes that we are otherwise blind to. Examples include the long-term shift from an environment in which children were expected to love their parents to one where parents seek to earn their children’s love; or the triumph of a therapeutic discourse, which uses psychological categories to understand children’s behavior and focuses on children’s emotional interior.

History also offers valuable lessons: That even very young children are more competent than our society assumes or that ideas about the nature of the child or how best to rear children have always been hotly contested.

Perhaps most important of all, history offers a fresh perspective on life today. It allows us to view present-day concerns and controversies from a novel vantage point. History offers dynamic, diachronic, longitudinal perspectives that are quite different from those generally advanced by the disciplines of psychology or sociology. By treating concepts and behavior patterns as constructs, history underscores the radical contingency of all social arrangements and modes of thought. In addition to stressing the importance of change over time, history also emphasizes the significance of social and cultural context, which has been always been crucial in shaping the nature and timing of key life course developments, indeed, more important, in my view, than any innate states of psychological or physiological development. History reminds us that conceptions of childhood and children’s essential nature, theories of child development, and approaches to childrearing – all have shifted profoundly over time.

The history of childhood is of more than antiquarian interest. Too often, history is regarded as preface – that is, as a source of fascinating anecdotes – or as mirror – a stark contrast to our supposedly more enlightened present. But history, including the history of childhood, is of more than antiquarian interest. With its emphasis on four C’s – change over time, the significance of context, the role of contingency in shaping historical development (and rejection of teleology), and the ever-present reality of conflict – greatly enriches, and, at times, challenges, the insights gleaned from other social sciences.

Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft:A History of American Childhood (2006) and The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood (2015)

Want to read more about childhood? Here are Steven Mintz’s picks for further reading.

Top photo: Russian playground (public domain)

Slavoj Žižek and Violence

By Ben Weiss

In Violence, popular political theorist, Slavoj Žižek, develops several notions for thinking about the contemporary world. While complex philosophical discussions often appear esoteric to the general reader, Žižek’s work renders new insights into numerous global issues, from politics and trade to social movements and cross-cultural exchanges. Entire books could be written on any one of the plethora of themes Žižek introduces. However, his reflections on the nature of violence and tolerance are particularly thought provoking.

Žižek’s book is fundamentally about understanding violence and the way it is represented in global society, especially in relation to economic interests. He draws a distinction between what he calls subjective violence and objective violence. Subjective violence refers to violence that is inflicted by a clearly identifiable agent of action, as in the case of criminal activity or terrorism. Objective violence, on the other hand, has no clear perpetrator and is often overlooked in the background of subjective violence outbreaks. For example, the objective violence of global poverty cannot be blamed on any one entity and, even if financial elites were to be identified as culpable, they could still be exonerated by their subjugation to a system of capitalist finance that makes the rise of an elite financial class inevitable. While Žižek further subdivides objective violence, the core difference illustrated here reflects Žižek’s interest in establishing the way certain forms of violence are represented and perceived in the general social consciousness.

The lack of a clearly identifiable perpetrator in cases of objective violence pushes them to the background while outbreaks of subjectively violent criminal activity, terrorist attacks, etc. easily draw popular attention. Because poverty is a constant, systematic form of violence, sudden violent incidents will attract more notice. Ultimately, Žižek claims that subjective forms of violence actually detract from public notice of objective forms of violence that are often caused by systemic issues that pervade the global financial sector. Žižek’s analysis helps reveal the ways in which world governments may act in the interests of trade networks and capital gains despite the objectively violent consequences that may implicate various populations around the world.

Further, Žižek also establishes that subjective violence, for example criminal activity, may result from the very objectively violent economic system that, in turn, may disenfranchise a group of people and cause them to violently resist their condition. In this way, Violence explains how popular attention to outbursts of violence by specific groups of people not only detracts from public attention to deeper issues but are also born from those deeper issues themselves.

Poster advertising Zizek's movie 'The Pervert's Guide to Ideology' — Poster advertising Zizek’s movie ‘The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology’

Žižek’s exploration of the interplay between subjective and objective violence in the context of state violence, cultural affiliation, political deliberation, and language itself, leads him to make interesting applications to the practice of tolerance. Tolerance exists today as a hallmark of Western liberal thought and, though controversial as it may be to question the potential negatives of such a practice, Žižek pushes readers to think about the ideologies many in the world take for granted. Žižek contends that tolerance necessitates some degree of objectively violent alienation between parties that tolerate one other. In effect, to tolerate other people is to crystalize their differences as a point of contention that must be respected, but not necessarily accepted. For Žižek, “the language of respect is the language of liberal tolerance: respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree.” What Žižek sees as dangerous about this dynamic, however, is that the enforcement of difference can become a point of oppression when one party crosses a line that cannot be tolerated by the other party. In this way, the crossing of a line may be articulated by governments as subjectively violent, even though the very rhetoric of tolerance frames the boundary that facilitated the outbreak of violence.

Slavoj Zizek in Liverpool, 2008. Via Wikipedia.

This dynamic points to the importance of Violence. Historically, Žižek has pushed the limits of scholarship to question even the most basic assumptions about the contemporary world. This work reveals the value of doing so. Outside of his specific applications, the definitional analysis he renders for types of violence proves incredibly useful for understanding the way politics intersect with public perception, and it causes us to raise essential and new questions about the world in which we live.

You may also like these articles in our Social Theory series:

Jing Zhai on Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction

Charles Stewart talks about Foucault on Power, Bodies, and Discipline

Juan Carlos de Orellana discusses Gramsci on Hegemony

Michel Lee explains Louis Althusser ideas on Interpellation, and the Ideological State Apparatus

H. W. Brands on the Rise of American Capitalism

By H. W. Brands

During the quarter millennium since American independence, two institutions and sets of values have come to characterize American society: democracy and capitalism. Each had roots in the eighteenth century, but each blossomed only in the nineteenth century. Democracy emerged first, during age of Jackson, as ordinary people began exercising political power and electing candidates who seemed much like themselves. By 1850, while the practice of democracy left much to be desired (neither women nor African Americans could vote), the principle had become unassailable in American politics.

Capitalism emerged later, during what Mark Twain derisively called the Gilded Age. But it burst forth with an energy and thoroughness that made the final third of the nineteenth century the era of America’s capitalist revolution. The revolution transformed American finance, turning Wall Street into the hub of investment and speculation and New York the budding capital of world finance. The capitalist revolution reshaped the larger economy, converting America from a nation of farmers into a country of urban workers, managers and professionals. It recast American geography, pulling the recently feudal South into the web of capitalist commerce and exploiting the natural resources of the West. It altered American politics, injecting money into elections as never before and making the nurturing of American business the principal agenda of the dominant Republican party.

The capitalist revolution spun off personal fortunes for John D. Rockefeller, the titan of oil; Andrew Carnegie, the sultan of steel; J. P. Morgan, the master of money; and a hundred lesser winners in the capitalist struggle for profit and dominance. It drew millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia, men and women who dreamed of achieving not the enormous wealth of Rockefeller and Carnegie but merely a modest piece of America’s prosperity for themselves and their children. It built cities of brick and steel and concrete, of skyscrapers and mansions and tenements and slums. It lifted the average American to a standard of living never attained anywhere else in previous history, even as it intensified inequalities between the rich and the poor.

John_D._Rockefeller_1885 — John D. Rockefeller

The capitalist revolution, like all revolutions, swept along the willing and unwilling alike. The winners outnumbered the losers, but they didn’t always outshout them. Farmers burdened with deflation-aggravated debt attempted to rein in the big capitalists. They created the Populist party and promoted candidates who promised to restore the traditional values on which the country had been built. Railroad workers, steel workers and other industrial laborers organized unions that waged strikes against their employers—and, in effect, against the government, when state and federal officials sided with the employers. Intellectuals challenged the ethos of capitalism, contending that the clamor for profit coarsened society and commodified life.

The capitalist revolution surged beyond American shores during the last decade of the nineteenth century. A withering depression caused merchants and manufacturers to seek markets abroad. A modern navy constructed in capitalist shipyards provided the means to extend American power to the far corners of the earth. The self-confidence the country’s bumptious growth had fostered encouraged Americans to emulate the imperial powers of Europe and Asia. In the 1890s the United States defeated Spain in battle, annexed islands and archipelagoes in the Caribbean and Pacific, and announced its entrance onto the stage of global power.

The capitalist revolution was the big story of era, but it was a big story composed of many small stories. Jay Gould was a young financier who grew a bushy beard to make him look older, and who remained calm during the tensest moments of difficult speculations, except for the telltale habit of tearing pieces of paper into tiny bits. Gould and his partner Jim Fisk, the P. T. Barnum of Wall Street, tried to corner the gold market in 1869 and nearly succeeded. They were foiled only at the last moment, when the federal government intervened. The ensuing turmoil wracked the financial world, jolted the broader economy, added “Black Friday” to America’s calendar of infamy, and nearly saw Gould and Fisk hanged from lampposts in lower Manhattan. James McParlan was a Pinkerton spy who infiltrated the “Molly Maguires,” the murderously radical wing of the coal miners of Pennsylvania. McParlan assumed a false identity, romanced the sister-in-law of one of the Mollies, and provided evidence that led to the execution of several of the radicals, some of whom quite likely were innocent of the crimes for which they were hanged.

Sleeping_homeless_children_-_Jacob_Riis — Jacob Riis, Sleeping Homeless Children

Jourdon Anderson was a former slave from Tennessee. He emigrated to Ohio after the war, only to receive a letter from his former master inviting him to come back. Anderson declined the invitation, saying he preferred his life in the North. He asked his master to convey his regards to his old friends on the plantation. “Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.” Gertrude Thomas was the wife of a Georgia planter ruined by the Civil War; she tried to make the transition from the prewar slave economy to the postwar capitalist economy, and from the former culture of deference to the new one characterized—for a time, at least—by egalitarianism. But the old habits and thought patterns died hard in her, and her life gradually disintegrated.

Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux who, as teenager, fought in the battle of the Little Bighorn and scalped a federal cavalryman while he was still alive. He was an adult when the federal army had its revenge at Wounded Knee, in the slaughter of women and children on a frozen hillside in Dakota. Charles Goodnight was a ranch man who blazed one of the long trails from Texas to Kansas by which cattle drovers put beef on Northern plates and Texas on the map of the national economy. Howard Ruede was a Pennsylvania boy who went west to claim a homestead in Kansas. He built a dugout home from the virgin sod, but knew he’d never win a wife until he moved upscale to a proper frame house with windows, door and a roof that didn’t leak mud every time it rained.

Mary Fales was a Chicagoan who lost her home and the belongings she couldn’t carry when the Chicago fire of 1871 roared through the city and destroyed her neighborhood. She nearly lost her life but managed to reach the shore of Lake Michigan, where refugees from the flames waded into the water to avoid being roasted on the beach. Jacob Riis was a young Dane who fled his homeland for America when the woman he loved married another man. After several rough years he found his calling as an investigative journalist and photographer; his exposé How the Other Half Lives alerted the country to the poverty that existed within a stone’s throw of the great wealth of New York City. Chun Ho was a Chinese girl who was lured to California on the promise of economic opportunity on the “Gold Mountain,” as America was called in China, but who was forced into prostitution. As an illegal immigrant she feared going to the police, who anyway were in cahoots with the woman who pimped her out. Eventually she made her escape, but knew other girls who were murdered in the attempt.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many Americans had concluded that the capitalist revolution, for all the material benefits it conferred, had tipped the balance too far away from democracy. The complaints accumulated to the point where an unforeseen event, the assassination of William McKinley, pushed the pendulum back in the opposite direction. Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley’s successor, led a democratic counterrevolution that during the first half of the twentieth century reclaimed for democracy the ground that had been lost to capitalism, and more—preparing the way for another reversal, during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which capitalism was again unleashed, and which culminated in a bust that provoked new demands to rein in the capitalists.

H. W. Brands, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900

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