By Melissa Ingells, WKAR News
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/wkar/local-wkar-977725.mp3
East Lansing, MI – Our book reviewer Lev Raphael takes a rather non-traditional look into the beer steins and dance halls of American history this month. He spoke with WKAR's Melissa Ingells.
AUDIO:
LEV RAPHAEL: I've got a great summer book for all the lovers of American History. It's called "A Renegade History of the United States," by Thaddeus Russell. And it's about a war that most of us don't know we're fighting.
MELISSA INGELLS: Okay. Um, when you first said you were going to bring this book in, I thought of the sort of alternative history by Howard Zinn. How does this compare to that, which is kind of I think a people's history, is what he said.
RAPHAEL: Right, right. Well, he goes even further because he goes into the history of the people America really doesn't want to think about. Drunks, whores, roustabouts, criminals, the Mafia. His thesis is unbelievably entertaining because what he says is that American history is really a struggle between order and chaos between the people who want everyone to behave, and the people who want to misbehave.
INGELLS: Which seems like a reasonable assessment of most history.
RAPHAEL: Well, certainly. However, it's kind of revolutionary, if you think of the American Revolution, you know, all our understanding of it is, we rose up against the British and we wanted freedom. Well, he quotes all the, many of the Founding Fathers saying that Americans weren't worthy of freedom, because they were drunk, lazy disorderly, chaotic, and basically sinful people. And so, even going all the way back to that period, you start seeing this struggle play out on many different levels, between the people who want everyone to be well behaved and those who just want to be free. Who want to do, and who want to be free to hang out with whomever they want. Founding Fathers and a couple of generations after, Americans were shocked whenever there was race mixing of any kind. And foreigners started to see this play out in the 1820s and 30s when they saw that Americans were workaholics. Well, a lot of Americans were workaholics, but a lot of Americans didn't want to work at all, or wanted to be drunk when they worked. And so Russell takes us through our history, looking at different periods of immigration, at the South, at the North, and follows this thread. I found it vastly entertaining.
INGELLS: It sounds like an anti-idealized history of the United States.
RAPHAEL: Absolutely, because drunkards have never had their day. There's even a whole thread all the way through about dancing being evil and sinful and encouraging sin, encouraging laziness, encouraging disorder. It's not the image of America that we're used to holding close to our hearts as encouraging liberty and freedom and the individual to be whomever he or she wants to be. And that's what makes it so much fun.
INGELLS: Why do you think he wrote this book? What do you think he was trying to get at?
RAPHAEL: I think he's a rebel. And I think he wanted to write the history that isn't in the textbooks.