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 Mc Clure’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, Mc Mansion 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.
Table of Content
Chapter 1. From The Jungle to Fast Food Nation: American Deja Vu
Chapter 2. Bulked Up, Hollowed Out: Looking Backward, Looking Forward
Chapter 3. Muckrakers c. 1900: Civic Passions, ‘Righteous Indignation’
Chapter 4. Muckrakers c. 2000
—Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed:On (Not) Getting By in America
—Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal
—Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
—Laurie Garrett, Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
—Joseph T. Hallinan, Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation
Epilogue: Tipping Point, or the Long Goodbye?
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
About the author
Cecelia Tichi is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, and has served as president of the American Studies Association. Among her books are Embodiment of a Nation: Human Form in American Places and High Lonesome: The American Culture of Country Music.
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