Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals

Jeremy McCarter's Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals offers a rousing history of a pivotal era in American history as lived and seen through the struggles of five prominent activists.

McCarter, a former culture critic for New York magazine and Newsweek, co-authored Hamilton: The Revolution with Lin-Manuel Miranda. He knows how to bring history to life, and he does it here splendidly with the lives of Randolph Bourne, Max Eastman, Walter Lippmann and John Reed--pioneers of socialist thought--as well as crusading suffragist Alice Paul. McCarter frames their respective struggles and evolving ideologies through lively narration, vividly capturing social and political realities of the U.S. in the early 20th-century. He reveals a formative time in both American and world history when society, coming out of the Industrial Revolution, was fraught with inequality and class warfare.

McCarter is almost elegiac in the way he writes of naive idealism. Young Radicals charts the rocky course of utopian idealism to the catastrophes of World War I, the atrocities of the Russian Revolution, and the mass disillusionment that would characterize the "Lost Generation." Yet all is not hopeless. That idealism melded with what became the progressive movement and produced tangible improvements in the human condition, including Paul's eventual victory in securing women's suffrage. Many of the political battles McCarter evaluates are shockingly relevant to modern-day politics. For instance, opining against the nativism and ethnic violence of his day, Bourne writes of "that miracle of hope, the peaceful living side by side, with character substantially preserved, of the most heterogeneous peoples under the sun." --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author

Powered by: Xtenit