The limited series for TV starts with the original Wide Awakes in Hartford. Then, as Henry Sperry spreads the club into new cities and states, we see those far-flung chapters as distinct, mostly self-contained story arcs where the local heroes fight for local needs.
For example, a young professor in an Ohio college town adores Charles Darwin’s new book about evolution. He uses his Wide Awake chapter to rally his University community around his vision of a Republican Party of science and modernity – versus everyone else who clings to a barbaric past. This young progressive bomb thrower used his chapter to boost his run for local office. He was a young James A. Garfield, the future President…who was assassinated for not being corrupt enough.
Another storyline diverges from the center in Hartford when a friend of Sperry’s inner circle moves to New York City. There, the friend, Sidney Gladwin, struggles to start a Wide Awake chapter. He discovers that everything in New York is bigger, harder, and more dangerous than anything back in rural Connecticut. He and his new city friends lock horns with the infamous gangs of New York, most of whom were employed by the white nationalist, nativist Know-Nothing Party or the racist Democrats. The young Wide Awakes battle the pro-South Mayor, the slavery-preserving Democrat machine, and the corrupt Police. They spread the Wide Awakes into unrepresented Irish immigrant communities. They tap into New York City’s celebrity entertainers who join the movement and write political songs that thousands sing at Republican Party rallies across the North.
The main storyline, however, remains the original Wide Awakes in Hartford who find themselves in the amazing position of defining the identity of the nascent Republican Party. After winning the CT Governor’s mansion, throughout the 6-month presidential campaign, the core leadership in Hartford struggles to resist misogynist and racist pressures from New England’s established political powers. They fight to keep alive their radical vision of a big-tent Republican Party.
Meanwhile, the Wide Awakes in Iowa are poor farmers who use the Wide Awakes to fight for prairie socialist policies. They want subsidies, government-backed insurance for crop failure, government-provided homes for seasonal workers, direct payments off-season, and more. During the Wide Awake summer, the movement bands Iowa’s rural communities together and gives the new state its first identity. The community-organizing of the Wide Awakes was done largely by partisan newspapermen such as liberal writer Orion Clemens, whose battle with his conservative little brother Samuel Langhorne Clemens made literary history during the tumult that came after Orion swung the state for Lincoln.
At the same time, the Hartford boys have to combat their own internal divisions and resist the corrupting influence that money and power exert on the celebrity leadership clique. After removing James Chalker, the self-destructive and selfish antagonist to Henry Sperry’s selfless hero, the club succeeds in galvanizing 22 states and unifying the Republican Party’s factions into one singular engine of liberalizing change.
In Missouri, leaders of the failed anti-monarchy German revolution of 1848-49 had been expelled to the U.S. where they became anti-slavery campaigners. The German radicals helped mobilize Union Army volunteers in their own super-charged Wide Awake chapters. Towns where Forty-Eighters settled boasted two-thirds higher Union Army enlistments. In Missouri, they carried their counties for Lincoln in Stephen Douglass’ home state. In Wide Awake uniforms, they were trained by Ulysses Grant to fight in urban warfare against rival marching clubs during some of the first skirmishes of the Civil War.
In the series finale, the Hartford leadership find themselves the guests of honor at a massive Wide Awake event in New York City… A city which had been a pro-slavery stronghold until dozens of Wide Awake chapters spread throughout town. When all of the Tri-State chapters come together for a united nighttime parade through Manhattan featuring the Hartford church boys in the front line, it is the largest political gathering in the history of New York. Days later, Lincoln was President.
The connection to Gangs of New York makes The Wide Awakes as a limited series an attractive option for TV creators who are interested in political activism, civic engagement, and historical projects from this era. Additionally, studios and networks will be interested in tying new IP with a modern sensibility such as The Wide Awakes to The Gangs of New York, especially considering that Herbert Asbury’s book enters public domain in 2022.