Ruling America or Open Letters

Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy

Author: Steve Fraser

Ruling America offers a panoramic history of our country's ruling elites from the time of the American Revolution to the present. At its heart is the greatest of American paradoxes: How have tiny minorities of the rich and privileged consistently exercised so much power in a nation built on the notion of rule by the people?

In a series of thought-provoking essays, leading scholars of American history examine every epoch in which ruling economic elites have shaped our national experience. They explore how elites came into existence, how they established their dominance over public affairs, and how their rule came to an end. The contributors analyze the elite coalition that led the Revolution and then examine the antebellum planters of the South and the merchant patricians of the North. Later chapters vividly portray the Gilded Age "robber barons," the great finance capitalists in the age of J. P. Morgan, and the foreign-policy "Establishment" of the post-World War II years. The book concludes with a dissection of the corporate-led counter-revolution against the New Deal characteristic of the Reagan and Bush era.

Rarely in the last half-century has one book afforded such a comprehensive look at the ways elite wealth and power have influenced the American experiment with democracy. At a time when the distribution of wealth and power has never been more unequal, Ruling America is of urgent contemporary relevance.

Publishers Weekly

Even in a nation founded on the principles of freedom and equality, small, motivated groups wield inordinate amounts of power. The notion itself is straightforward, but the 11 historians contributing to this volume examine it rigorously, documenting the dominance of American ruling classes like the antebellum South s slave power, the North s Merchants and Manufacturers, the nouveau riche industrialists of the Gilded Age and the Cold War s Foreign Policy Establishment. Each essay chronicles the myriad factors that led to the consolidation of power by one such set of aristocrats, and then explains the internal divisions and external changes that led to their downfall and empowered their successors. For example, a small clique of graduates from top New England boarding schools and universities coalesced into the Establishment, dominating foreign policy with their worldview until Vietnam raised questions that the foreign policy Establishment was not successfully able to answer. The most recent manifestation of this elite baton-passing, according to a convincing entry by Michael Lind, resulted in the southernization of American society under which the country morphed into a low-wage society with weak parties, weak unions and a political culture based on demagogic appeals to racial and ethnic anxieties, religious conservatism, and militaristic patriotism. The volume captures the essence of varied eras and their elites, but at times the narrative suffers from dry academic prose and a shortage of illustrative anecdotes. Curiously, the editors conclude that despite 200 years of cyclical history, no current challenge is arising to overthrow the currently prevailing counterrevolution against the New Deal. In fact, in suggesting that the democratic urge to rein in the dangerous ambitions of privileged elites has gone frail, they undermine the key lesson of the compilation itself. (Apr.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Table of Contents:

	Introduction	1
1	The dilemmas of ruling elites in Revolutionary America	27
2	The "slave power" in the United States, 1783-1865	64
3	Merchants and manufacturers in the antebellum north	92
4	Gilded Age gospels	123
5	The abortive rule of big money	149
6	The managerial revitalization of the rich	181
7	The foreign policy establishment	215
8	Conservative elites and the counterrevolution against the New Deal	250
	Coda : democracy in America	286

Book about: Surveillance dans l'Industrie d'Hospitalité :Ressources Humaines Appliquées

Open Letters: Selected Writings, 1965-1990

Author: Vaclav Havel

Spanning twenty-five years, this historic collection of writings shows Vaclav Havel's evolution from a modestly known playwright who had the courage to advise and criticize Czechoslovakia's leaders to a newly elected president whose first address to his fellow citizens begins, "I assume you did not propose me for this office so that I, too, would lie to you." Some of the pieces in Open Letters, such as "Dear Dr. Husak" and the essay "The Power of the Powerless," are by now almost legendary for their influence on a generation of Eastern European dissidents; others, such as some of Havel's prison correspondence and his private letter to Alexander Dubcek, appear in English for the first time. All of them bear the unmistakable imprint of Havel's intellectual rigor, moral conviction, and unassuming eloquence, while standing as important additions to the world's literature of conscience.

Publishers Weekly

A stirring collection of political essays, letters, speeches, autobiographical sketches, interviews and musings, mostly from the years that Havel, now Czechoslovakia's president, spent as his nation's leading dissident. (June)

Library Journal

This selection of Havel's 25 best essays written since 1965 is a fascinating chronicle of the development and ideas of the greatly admired Czechoslovakian dissident turned president. Whether he muses on Gorbachev, his harassment by the police, or the ever-present danger of injustices being committed in service of noble words, Havel writes with clarity, wit, eloquence, a steadfast optimism, and remarkable courage. Although some of the pieces were already published in Vaclav Havel, or Living in Truth ( LJ 8/87), such as the influential essays on the nature of totalitarianism (``Power of the Powerless'') and on the global crises of human responsibility (``Politics and Conscience''), this is an important book that belongs in both academic and public libraries.-- Marie Bednar, Pennsylvania State Univ. Libs., University Park