Young Radicals

April 15, 2017
In the decade before World War I, five rebellious Americans took up the cause of socialism, progressivism, and women's suffrage.A former cultural critic for New York and Newsweek, McCarter (co-author: Hamilton: The Revolution, 2016, etc.) began his research for this book six years ago, a time of political gridlock, voter apathy, and cynicism. America in the 1910s beckoned as a stark contrast: "a country vibrating with hope, supremely confident in its prospects, charging into the future, not just in its politics, but socially and culturally, too." At the head of the charge were five radicals: Max Eastman, John Reed, Randolph Bourne, Walter Lippmann, and Alice Paul, whose personal and professional careers McCarter traces in vivid detail. The four men were writers: Eastman became editor of The Masses, a journal outspoken in its support of socialism; Bourne, a hunchback due to a childhood illness, championed "the unpresentable and the unemployable, the incompetent and the ugly, the queer and crotchety people...like him." A perceptive social critic, he became Lippmann's colleague on the New Republic, a politically radical startup. In his reporting and book Ten Days that Shook the World (1919), Reed heralded the Russian Revolution as a harbinger of social change. Lippmann, the most influential of the men, evolved from being "the boy wonder of socialism" to support the progressivism of Teddy Roosevelt and eventually join the administration of Woodrow Wilson. Paul's story, as McCarter shows, is the most violent: her tireless, combative campaign for a federal amendment for women's suffrage put her at odds with others in the movement, resigned to state-by-state ratification. She suffered degrading imprisonment, forced feeding, and bloody confrontations. "We have no true democracy in this country, though we are fighting for democracy abroad," she proclaimed, as America joined the controversial war. That war, and the failure of the peace process, left the nation spiritually exhausted, unleashed racial and ethnic hatred, and undermined the radicals' efforts. A brisk pace and sympathetic portraits make for an entertaining, well-researched history of a decade marked by ebullience, hope, and pain.

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Starred review from May 15, 2017

This new history from McCarter (Hamilton: The Revolution) profiles five young radicals from the World War I era: Jack Reed, Walter Lippman, Max Eastman, Randolph Bourne, and Alice Paul. All except Paul, who was dedicated to women's suffrage, were involved in the socialist movement. McCarter zeroes in on their radical idealism and how they navigated turbulent times and backlashes against socialism, women's rights, and pacifism during World War I. Opening in 1912, this work traces the lives of its subjects as they started magazines such as The Masses, wrote groundbreaking articles, poetry, and plays, and staged pageants and parades for their causes. This book closes in 1920, and although women's suffrage was ratified, Eastman and Lippman had started to step away from their commitment to socialism in the face of the recent Palmer Raids. While oddly written in the present tense, McCarter's prose is engaging, moving, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. VERDICT Recommended for young radicals today who want to understand past attempts to change the world in the face of repression.--Kate Stewart, American Folklife Ctr., Washington, DC

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2017
Five young Americans agitate for change in the tumultuous 1910s and are changed by the resistance they encounter. Max Eastman, a leading light in the emergent Greenwich Village radical scene, publishes the socialist magazine the Masses and is indicted for sedition. His friend John Reed achieves symbolic prominence as America's leading Communist but fails in his quest to bring the Russian Revolution to the U.S. Suffragist Alice Paul endures mob violence and hunger-strike force-feedings but succeeds in bringing public attention to the cause, with legislative progress to follow. Journalist Walter Lippman eschews radicalism, wielding influence through a position in the Wilson administration. Randolph Bourne, arguably the most complicated of the bunch, transcends physical disability to become the era's most articulate critic of American democracy, lambasting those who cite Progressive ideals in the march to war. It is the Great War, after all, that devastates the Progressive movement as the young are sent to the trenches and cosmopolitan optimism is replaced by a crude nativism. Though this is, ultimately, about the fragmentation of a political movement, We ought to be braced by the example of the young radicals, McCarter writes, for battles for ideals are never final. The success of Hamilton: The Revolution (2016), which McCarter coauthored with Lin-Manuel Miranda, will drive considerable demand.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)