Ages of American Capitalism

Starred review from February 1, 2021
The sprawling saga of a national economy that has gone through several phases, the lion's share of ownership becoming ever narrower. Capital, writes economic historian Levy, is "the process through which a legal asset is invested with pecuniary value, in light of its capacity to yield a future pecuniary profit." The word invested is an important component, since investment, the trust that the future will reward present outlay, is critical. In early U.S. history, the wherewithal for investment was limited to White men, who enjoyed the benefit of an economy fueled by slaves. Racial domination was central, effected in part by "an assortment of odd tasks that masters and overseers ingeniously invented to keep their slaves busy" when they were not harvesting cotton. The current doctrine--fomented primarily by evangelists and so-called conservatives--that poverty is the poor person's fault goes back a surprisingly long time. Levy links it to the social Darwinism of the 1870s and '80s. "What the social classes owed to each other was, essentially, nothing," he writes of that doctrine. Union membership helped improve the lot of many workers in the decades following, but even so, a certain social Darwinism prevailed, through which one can detect the origins of pay disparity between White and minority workers and, especially, male and female workers. As Levy notes in this detailed, discursive narrative, union political power was grudgingly granted after the owners of capital battled workers endlessly: "Between 1880 and 1930, according to one estimate, U.S. courts would issue no less than 4,300 injunctions against labor union activity." In time, though, union power would erode as Richard Nixon and other right-wing politicians exploited "white blue-collar dissatisfaction," a divide-and-conquer motif that continues into the present. It helps to have some knowledge of economics to read this book, though it's not essential. Levy is an uncommonly lucid interpreter of numbers and theories and a nimble explainer. A rewarding exercise in understanding where we are and how we got there.

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April 1, 2021

The history of the United States is the history of capitalism. The colonies began when property and trade were still new concepts in Europe and the country relied on the exploitation of human labor--first of Indigenous and enslaved peoples, and then of all workers--to grow the economy. Each era of exploitation was met with a violent response, until the political infrastructure turned to the divide-and-conquer plan that defines our modern era. Levy (history, Univ. of Chicago; Freaks of Fortune) has given us a textbook on America that successfully explains history through an economic perspective. The book breaks down centuries of history into four eras: the ages of commerce, capital, control, and chaos. Through these ages, we move from the foundation of the colonies and a new nation, to the current age, which Levy defines as one of investment and liquidity. This massive tome provides a clear narrative of how economic power in America has always resided with those rich enough to invest. An understanding of economic principles is helpful but not essential to following Levy's analysis. VERDICT Levy makes a cohesive argument that provides a new perspective on the trajectory of the U.S. but will still feel familiar to any student of history.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

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Starred review from March 15, 2021
Economic theories distilled as mathematical formulas cannot capture the cultural complexities Levy explores as he surveys four centuries of American economic evolution. Moving from John Winthrop's world of seventeenth-century colonial trade to Donald Trump's twenty-first-century leveraged real-estate acquisitions, Levy weaves a great many precepts from economic theory into his narrative, illustrating their significance with carefully parsed statistics and graphs. But he also finds the social meaning of economic developments in paintings, song lyrics, novels, movies, and television shows. A Thomas Doughty landscape painting identifies the setting in which the English understanding of property collided with that of Native American tribes. A Fanny Trollope travelogue illustrates the commercial obsessions shaping the materialistic souls of nineteenth-century Americans. In Victoria Spivey's song "Detroit Moan," readers feel the desperation and shame degrading millions of Americans during the Great Depression. Rejecting the narrow rationalism focused exclusively on the profit motive, Levy develops a fully human perspective on capitalism, allowing readers to see investment, not profit, as its flywheel. He soberly examines the sluggishness of that flywheel in recent decades, as anxious Americans have preferred the security of immediate liquidity over the risk of long-term investment. Asserting that only political realignment can restore economic health, Levy's conclusion will stir debate.

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