America Reborn: A Twentieth-Century Narrative in Twenty-six Lives

by Martin Walker

Here is the story of America in the twentieth century as told through the lives of twenty-six of its most remarkable and historically crucial men and women.

The people Martin Walker has chosen to portray are presidents, industrialists, artists, thinkers, entertainers, soldiers, spies, criminals, and evangelists, among others, and he makes the life of each individual serve as a framework for a discussion of the nation as a whole in a century when it was reinventing itself.

Through Theodore Roosevelt, Walker examines America's ambition; through Woodrow Wilson, our idealism; through FDR, our triumph on the world stage; through Richard Nixon, our retreat into cynicism; through Bill Clinton, globalization and controversy about the right way to use America's unprecedented power.

In Henry Ford he finds the creator of both the mass-market product and the mass-market consumer, and in Walt Disney, the revolutionizer not only of America's entertainment but also of the world's. William Boeing is the innovator who spurs the behemoth of American aviation; Walter Reuther defines labor's struggles; George C. Marshall represents the spread of America's economic genius in a war-ravaged Europe.

In the lives of Duke Ellington, Frank Lloyd Wright, Katharine Hepburn, and John Steinbeck, Walker traces America's far-reaching cultural influences. Babe Ruth leads to a consideration of the role of sports in our society; William F. Buckley, Jr., to a discussion of conservatism; Martin Luther King, Jr., to matters of race; Betty Friedan to the shifting role of women; Billy Graham to an examination of religion; Emma Goldman to minority viewpoints and dissent; Black Jack Pershing to the place of the military; Lucky Luciano to crime and corruption; Albert Einstein to immigration; Richard Bissell to spies and the intelligence network; Alan Greenspan to finance and banking; and Winston Churchill to the American diaspora.

At once intimate and wide-ranging, America Reborn is an altogether engrossing work of narrative history.

Genres: History

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Martin Walker is the U.S. bureau chief for The Guardian (London), a regular commentator for CNN, and a columnist for newspapers in the United States, Europe, and Moscow. A published novelist and poet, he lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, the novelist Julia Watson, and their two daughters.

Reviews

[Brian Eshleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Authors aren't supposed to be able to generalize the way he does. They are supposed to burrow into one decade of the 20th century. Yet he speaks with engaging authority throughout. Choosing to conduct his narrative at shoulder height to some of the century's leading figures is a particularly engaging way to introduce the reader to parts of this curtain century he or she may not be familiar with.

Students and spinners of biography also shouldn't be this good at painting by the numbers. Yet, no sooner does Walker talk about a trend that a given personality wrought or reacted to that he comes out with a trend-tracing number comprehensible even to this history major.

[Rebecca Wilkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

After enjoying all 12 of Martin Walker's Bruno Chief of Police series, I noted that he also had published some non-fiction work back in the late 90's and 2000. They were not readily available, although Amazon can find anything. The first of these I read was THE PRESIDENT THEY DESERVE about Bill Clinton. It was an excellent book but written in 1997 and not including his second term. Now in AMERICA REBORN Walker's final chapter is on Clinton and covers the final 4 years. This book was written in 2000 and purports to describe the American 20th Century through the lives of 26 people. Previously I read THE MODERN MIND by Peter Watson which is a more global look at the intellectual history of the 20th Century. These are both good studies of what is called The American Century.

Walker is a Brit who lived in the US as a journalist for, he says, "half his life." He had a personal relationship with Clinton and Steinbeck's third wife but he did extensive study of each of his 26 people. In a way it seems odd to have a Brit explaining USA history but he does an excellent job in what are not very long chapters at getting to the essence of each one. The people are chosen for the area of history they best represent; William Boeing-The American Airplane, Billy Graham-American Religion, Alan Greenspan-American Banker, George Marshall-American Power and even Winston Churchill-American Diaspora. Because Walker is not an American, he brings a more world view to American history and yet has done his homework well enough to make you think he is an American.

Walker says: "The hackneyed phrase "the melting pot" is precisely the wrong metaphor to capture the way in which American culture managed to preserve so many of the distinctive cultural traditions of its immigrants. The result has been more of a long-simmering stew in which the individual components retained their distinctive shapes and textures while producing a common flavor."

"The 20th century was a long experiment in how the cherished traditions of individualism and self-reliance, property ownership and local self-government could survive the closing of the frontier."

Teddy Roosevelt whose chapter entitles The American Ambition and is known for his "bully pulpit" is said to "have invented the crucial component of the modern presidency: the media presence that soared beyond politics directly to the people."

Winston Churchill The American Diaspora reveals that Churchill and FDR were distant cousins. "With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps the most lasting impact of Churchill's political career was his arranging the tidy transfer of global power from an exhausted Britain to an ebullient America. Churchill was the heir to the dynastic union of American wealth and British ancestry."

George Marshall and American Power says "Marshall maintained military readiness while building Western Europe and Japan into a prosperity that would help sustain that joint venture. In the end the West prevailed because it could afford guns as well as butter, aircraft carriers as well as vacations abroad, a vast expansion of wealth that secured the political support of its democracies for the strategic long haul. Marshall not only built, deployed and directed America's ascendance to global power; he convinced his presidents and the country of its need."

Billy Graham and The American Religion: "The Modesto Manifesto noted that the greatest temptation to a traveling preacher was sex and one rule stipulated that Graham and his fellow preachers should never be alone with any woman but their wives." When I heard in 2016 that Vice President Pence adhered to this rule I thought it was his own religious quirky insecurity but it is an actual thing for fundamentalist religious leaders!

One of the great features of Walker's Bruno series is all the French history that seeps into the mysteries. In THE RESISTANCE MAN he talks about Marshall Plan money in Europe post WW2. In AMERICA REBORN he says under RICHARD BISSELL-AMERICAN SPY: "The CIA was never short of money in Europe as they were using unvouchered slush funds from the $200 million a year in local currencies that Europeans paid to the US under the rules of the Marshall Plan." All the research he did for his non-fiction books and journalism is recycled into his fictional mystery series but both give we the readers an insight into some of the background of world/USA history.

Much is written about the economic history and I am reminded of the phrase from the movie ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN "Follow the Money". Walker does that from Woodrow Wilson and the institution of the income tax and the Federal Reserve Board through FDR's New Deal and Nixon's "abandoning the gold standard and devaluation of the dollar that launched the institutionalized anarchy of floating exchange rates and the great inflation of the 1970's." He says Clinton will go down in history as the "free-trade president". He says of the Clinton years "the slow revolution in the economy was spurred by the fastest-growing sector of American trade, its exports of services including computer software, movies, insurance, royalties, financial services and telecommunications." It stopped being cars, steel and farm products even before 2000.

He ends with "the world was generally a more prosperous, more peaceful and more hopeful place at the end of the 20th century than it had been throughout it."

[Mike Macchi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe this book only has a 4-star rating. I gave it 5-stars enthusiastically. So interesting. So well written

[Catherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book, written by an English journalist, is a history of the 20th Century as told through the lives of 21 men and women who helped to shape it. It's an interesting approach to covering 100 years of history and the people chosen are definitely people who made a mark on US history during that time. As with any book that takes on such a large task, there are many more that could have been included but were left out for sake of limiting the scope of the book. It's definitely worth the read because it gives one perspective on government policy and economics as well as sociopolitical movements that shaped the century.

[Matthew Johnston · Rating 2 out of 5]

So much filler, I gave up.

[Jan Wolfe]

The biographies and interactions of the people profiled provide an engaging way to review and think about the history of the United States during the twentieth century.