Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

Recent Books

January/February 2020 185

Voting Rights Act, to the uncertain

present. The message is clear: progress is

not linear. Rights can be granted, “and

they can be taken away”—in this case for

an entire century. The book makes

constitutional jurisprudence easily acces-

sible to nonlawyers and illuminates the

United States’ continuing troubled

history of racism. Without shortchanging

present-day struggles, Foner’s view of

the future is surprisingly hopeful.

Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past,

Present, and Future of American Labor

BY STEVEN GREENHOUSE. Knopf,

2019, 416 pp.

Only 10.5 percent of American workers

are unionized, including less than

seven percent of those who work in the

private sector. Yet according to polls,

nearly half of nonunion workers (58

million individuals) say they would vote

to join a union if they could. The need

is obvious: workers’ share of the national

income (pay and benefits) is at its

lowest level since the 1940s, and average

inflation-adjusted hourly pay has been

flat since the early 1970s. And public

approval of unions is surprisingly high:

62 percent. Unions have a mixed track

record, with noble successes and sordid

failures. Their future is hard to predict, as

they wrestle with whether to reinvent

themselves by focusing on broad workers’

rights campaigns, which would benefit

many workers who might never join a

union, such as the Fight for $15 push to

raise minimum wages. Greenhouse blends

solid historical research with the inti-

mate knowledge he has gleaned from

20 years of reporting on organized labor

to tell an often deeply moving story

that has much to say about whether the

cable news that exploded in the 1990s
(“no narrative, no logic, no arc, and no
end”), the reality shows that took off in
the early years of this century (raw
aggression is rewarded, and someone
has to lose for someone else to win),
and the dark dramas that have won over
audiences in recent years (the star is an
antihero). As a candidate, he “recognized
intuitively what the televised debates
were: an elimination-based reality show.”
The relationship eventually became
symbiotic. He wanted what the camera’s
red light wanted: conflict and drama.
The book is so rich with insights about
the man and the medium that it isn’t
until the end that readers will realize it’s
still not clear how 60 million Americans
could come to see an obviously phony
performer as the person they wanted in
the Oval Office.

The Second Founding: How the Civil War
and Reconstruction Remade the
Constitution
BY ERIC FONER. Norton, 2019, 256 pp.

This book’s thesis is captured in its
title: the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amend-
ments to the U.S. Constitution—which,
respectively, abolished slavery, granted
birthright citizenship and equal protec-
tion under the law, and established
voting rights for black (male) Ameri-
cans—did not just change the text; they
created “a fundamentally new docu-
ment.” Foner has written more than 20
heralded books on the Civil War. This
one traces the roller-coaster history of
the core acts of Reconstruction from
their passage, through the “long retreat”
of the Jim Crow decades, to the civil
rights legislation of the 1960s, to the
Supreme Court’s 2013 rollback of the