by Walter A. McDougall.

Harper. 787 pages. $34.95.

BY MARK DUNKELMAN
Special to the Journal

The dust jacket of this book is adorned with crossed Star-Spangled Banners surmounted by a gilded eagle. But never fear: that’s the only resemblance Throes of Democracy has to the uncritical panegyrics we baby boomers used to read in high school American history classes.

This is the second of a multi-volume history of the United States by Walter McDougall, a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania. He informs us in a prefatory synopsis that the first volume, Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585-1828, presented Americans as hustlers, “in both the positive and negative senses.” Throes of Democracy paints certain of our forebears as people of pretenses, worshiping at the altar of liberty and freedom while stealing the land from Native Americans and Mexicans, enslaving millions of African Americans, and using and abusing waves of European immigrants.

It is no mean feat to cover comprehensively the social, political, economic, scientific, religious and artistic developments in the lengthy and tumultuous period between the presidencies of Jackson and Hayes. McDougall pulls it off brilliantly. He gracefully combines chronological and topical approaches, as in a chapter that smoothly segues from developments in mathematics to the taking of the census to the massive influx of Irish and German and Jewish immigrants to the demographic changes that carried Yankee mores into the Midwest to life on Western farms to mechanical improvements in agriculture and industry to the condition of laborers in the burgeoning mills and factories — to name just the topics covered in the chapter’s first half, and to give no indication of the depth the author devotes to each.

When it comes to long-accepted dogmas, McDougall is often a contrarian. He weighs the evidence and judges accordingly, often arriving at conclusions that surprised him — finding good things to say about the frequently maligned James Buchanan, for example, perceiving benefits in the doings of political machines and the Robber Barons, and seeing through the pretense of Civil War memory to get at the ultimate tragedy of the war: the winning of the peace by white Southerners.

McDougall’s portrait reveals a robust America wearing a cocky grin, disfigured by blemishes and eyes that can’t quite bear to peer into the mirror of the nation’s legacy. THROES OF DEMOCRACY: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877,

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