From robber barons to titanic CEOs, from the labor unrest of the 1880s
to the mass layoffs of the 1990s, two American Gilded Ages--one in the
early 1900s, another in the final years of the twentieth century--mirror
each other in their laissez-faire excess and rampant social crises. Both
eras have ignited the civic passions of investigative writers who have
drafted diagnostic blueprints for urgently needed change. The compelling
narratives of the muckrakers--Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, Lincoln
Steffens, and Ray Stannard Baker among them--became bestsellers and
prizewinners a hundred years ago; today, Cecelia Tichi notes, they have
found their worthy successors in writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich,
Eric Schlosser, and Naomi Klein.
In Exposés and Excess Tichi explores the two Gilded Ages through the
lens of their muckrakers. Drawing from her considerable and wide-ranging
work in American studies, Tichi details how the writers of the first
muckraking generation used fact-based narratives in magazines such as
McClure's to rouse the U.S. public to civic action in an era of
unbridled industrial capitalism and fear of the immigrant dangerous
classes. Offering a damning cultural analysis of the new Gilded Age,
Tichi depicts a booming, insecure, fortress America of bulked-up baby
strollers, McMansion housing, and an obsession with money-as-lifeline in
an era of deregulation, yawning income gaps, and idolatry of the market
and its rock-star CEOs.
No one has captured this period of corrosive boom more acutely than the
group of nonfiction writers who burst on the scene in the late 1990s
with their exposés of the fast-food industry, the world of low-wage
work, inadequate health care, corporate branding, and the
multibillion-dollar prison industry. And nowhere have these
authors--Ehrenreich, Schlosser, Klein, Laurie Garrett, and Joseph
Hallinan--revealed more about their emergence as writers and the
connections between journalism and literary narrative than in the rich
and insightful interviews that round out the book.
With passion and wit, Exposés and Excess brings a literary genre up to
date at a moment when America has gone back to the future.
