FORUM: SHOULD WE ABOLISH
AGE”?
THE
“GILDED
Editor’s Note: What follows is a revised version of a roundtable from the
2007 Organization of American Historians meeting that may not make the
participants popular with readers of this journal. In recent decades, much
debate has revolved around the viability of the term “Progressive Era,” but
people in the first two decades of the twentieth century did commonly talk
about their time as “progressive” in roughly the same way that historians use
the adjective. Close examination reveals “Gilded Age” to be the more questionable of the two period labels on the masthead. For sure, contemporaries
knew Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 novel, The Gilded Age:
A Tale of Today, and especially the play based on it. And they did consider
this story and its characters relevant as satires of their time. But as several
historians have noticed, Americans in the last decades of the 1800s almost
never used “Gilded Age” as a general label for their era; they almost always
used it in direct reference to the novel or the play. The use of “Gilded Age”
as a general periodization term dates from the 1910s and 1920s, when culture critics such as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford found it a useful
motif for lamenting the alleged shallowness and vulgarity against which they
were rebelling. From iconoclastic cultural criticism, the idea of a Gilded Age
passed into historical writing by the 1930s and became so commonplace that
its provenance was forgotten.
There are several ways to approach the revelation that a beloved periodization device is an historian’s construct with dubious roots in the years described. During the 2007 OAH forum, this editor—in part because he does
not want to redo the stationery—took an agnostic position concerning what
to call the late 1800s. He concentrated instead on the historiographic and
intellectual history problem of what the notion of a Gilded Age says about
how Americans impute moral and political meaning to their country’s past.
Rebecca Edwards and Richard R. John approach the matter as a problem
of historical analysis. If the late 1800s was not the Gilded Age, they ask,
what was it? Edwards’s answer draws on the political trends and movements
and policy innovations of those decades, while John derives lessons from the
history of business, technology, and political economy. Of the two, Edwards
is more determined to abolish the Gilded Age as a separate period; her argument is in keeping with a strong recent trend toward regarding circa 1870–
1920 as a single period, perhaps a “long progressive era.” John seems amenable to considering the decades from the Civil War to the Spanish-American
War as a distinct period if we can find a less heavy-handed and misleading
label for those years. As he did in 2007, Richard Bensel, the historian of
Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era 8:4 (October 2009)
462 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
political economy, follows with a rueful comment on the challenge involved
in moving U.S. historians to change the way that they divide up and label the
past, along with a modest proposal for overcoming that inertia.
This is the journal’s second forum in recent years on the problem of periodizing the late 1800s. For a vigorous case that the Gilded Age did exist as a
distinct period, see Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded
Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” with comments by James L. Huston and Rebecca Edwards, in the July 2006 issue (5.3).
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 463
Politics, Social Movements, and the
Periodization of U.S. History
By Rebecca Edwards, Vassar College
It may be perilous for a member of the Society of Historians of the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era to propose, in the Journal of the Gilded Age
and Progressive Era, that we cease using the term “Gilded Age” as a label for
the late nineteenth century. Since I admire Mark Twain, who famously coined
the term in a novel that he cowrote with Charles Dudley Warner, such a
suggestion feels disloyal if not downright un-American. But in struggling
recently to write a synthesis of the United States between 1865 and 1905
(cutoff dates that I chose with considerable doubt), it became apparent to
me that “Gilded Age” is not a very useful or accurate term. Intended as an
indictment of the elite, it captures none of the era’s grassroots ferment and
little of its social and intellectual complexity. A review of recent literature
suggests that periodizing schemes are now in flux, and a reconsideration may
be in order.1
The Gilded Age is usually defined as the “last third of the nineteenth
century” or thereabouts, from the 1870s to about 1900.2 Reconstruction
is often—but not always—treated as a distinct era running from 1865
to 1877, with the Gilded Age beginning after its demise. The Twain and
Warner novel appeared in 1873, and taking the narrowest view one could
argue that their satire pertained to the scandals and malaise of the second
Grant administration (1873–77), though that is not much of an “age.” At the
other extreme, some connoisseurs of architecture describe the Gilded Age
as running from “the end of the Civil War to the Crash of the Stock Market
1
The synthesis is New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York, 2007). It
was my desire to leave “Gilded Age” out of the title, but editors at Oxford University Press
argued that it still defines the era and that dates alone would not enable readers to identify the
era covered. This suggests the enduring significance of the term “Gilded Age,” though I have
reached an agreement to put the term in quotation marks for the forthcoming second edition.
In recent decades, historical research on women, gender, and women’s reform has been an
especially powerful influence on rethinking conventional periodization of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era; see Elisabeth Perry, “Men Are from the Gilded Age, Women Are from the
Progressive Era,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (Jan. 2002): 25–48.
2
Charles W. Calhoun, ed., introduction to The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern
America, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD, 2007), 1. The fine essays in this volume generally date the era
from 1870 to 1900 or 1901, though some begin at 1877. Lewis L. Gould defines the era as “the
quarter century between the end of Reconstruction and Theodore Roosevelt’s accession to
the presidency” in The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer (New York,
2001), 308.
464 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
in 1929.”3 This erases the Progressive Era, and I suspect few scholars would
concur. It does point up an interesting continuity: From the perspective of
those who, today, manage great estates like the Flagler Museum, industrialists’
ascendancy lasted until the Great Depression and New Deal finally knocked
the stuffing out of their fortunes. The Progressive Era made barely a dent.
Among scholars, the single most influential view may continue to be that of
Robert Wiebe, who famously dated the rise of progressivism to around 1900
and attributed it to “the ambition of the new middle class to fulfill its destiny
through bureaucratic means.”4
However it is chronologically defined, the standard narrative of the Gilded
Age is familiar. This was the era when capital and labor fought their first
pitched battles on a national scale, and capital won. Wealth became far more
concentrated; the super-rich turned their backs callously on the poor, lavishing
millions on banquets and Worth ball gowns. Multinational corporations arose
to exercise untrammeled power, while government stood by passively, bound
by the ideology of social Darwinism and laissez faire. Where government
was active, it was riddled with corruption. Although (this story goes) a series
of admirable movements protested the new conditions, all of them failed.
The most universally perceived feature of the Gilded Age appears to be
political stagnation and corruption. I recently reviewed a host of U.S. history
textbook chapters on the Gilded Age and found the following descriptors:
“paralysis,” “misrule,” “spoilsmen,” “degradation,” “discontent,” “malaise,”
and “ordeal.” Making America sums up politics between 1865 and 1890 as
“Parties, Spoils, Scandals, and Stalemate” and “the Politics of Stalemate”;
America’s History describes “The Politics of the Status Quo.”5 Students,
confronted with such a static and demoralizing analysis, must surely skip to
the next chapter if they think they can get away with it.
If they do, they are greeted by the start of the so-called Progressive
Era, often in the figure of Theodore Roosevelt. The century turned,
and Americans now felt optimistic about the possibility of change. They
organized to challenge big business, restore good government, and ameliorate
Henry Morrison Flagler Museum, “America’s Gilded Age,” http://flaglermuseum.us/
html/gilded_age.html. For a judicious scholarly view of uses and misuses of the term “Gilded
Age,” see Calhoun’s introduction to The Gilded Age, cited above.
4
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York, 1967), 166.
5
The textbooks surveyed include Edward L. Ayers et al., American Passages (Fort Worth,
TX, 2000); Carol Berkin et al., Making America, 4th ed. (Boston, 2006); John Mack Faragher et
al., Out of Many, 4th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2000); Steven M. Gillon et al., The American
Experiment, 2nd ed. (Boston, 2006); James A. Henretta et al., America’s History, 6th ed. (Boston,
2008); Patricia Nelson Limerick et al., This Land (Maplecrest, NY, 2003); John Murrin et al.,
Liberty, Equality, Power, 5th ed. (Belmont, CA, 2007); Mary Beth Norton et al., A People and a
Nation, 6th ed. (Boston, 2001); and James L. Roark et al., The American Promise, 3rd ed. (Boston,
2005). The Gillon and Roark textbooks suggest a possible emerging trend to date the beginning of the Progressive Era to around 1890, though they are still in the minority.
3
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 465
poverty. Those who organized before 1900 to challenge big business, restore
good government, and ameliorate poverty are treated in a highly selective
way. Jane Addams’s Hull House, begun in 1889, is almost always identified
as a progressive initiative. But I have not yet found a textbook in which the
Farmers Alliance and Populists are treated as progressives, even though Hull
House was founded just as the Farmers’ Alliance reached its zenith and the
People’s Party emerged.
The standard Gilded Age/Progressive Era narrative marginalizes several
narratives of declension between the two eras—stories of political possibilities
that were open before 1900 but closed off afterward. Two examples are
worth mentioning briefly. First, in the main thread of African American
history, emancipation was followed by several decades of institution building
and intense struggle over the parameters of freedom. As late as the 1890s,
in some parts of the South, African Americans voted in significant numbers
and used the courts to fight discrimination and segregation. But the turn
of the century ushered in the Solid South, disfranchisement, and Plessy v.
Ferguson. As historians have noted, if there is any kind of progressive story
here, it is a grim one.6
The history of U.S. foreign relations highlights another glaring problem
with the Gilded Age/Progressive Era storyline: Around 1900, the United
States laid claim to Cuba and the Philippines and began a steady pattern of
military interventions in the Caribbean and Central America.7 Imperialism
may or may not mark a sharp discontinuity in U.S. policy—that remains
contested—but overseas conquest fits awkwardly, at best, into a story of
turn-of-the-century citizens who suddenly took up the causes of democracy,
poverty eradication, and social justice. Students may well read about Plessy,
disfranchisement, and imperialism and ask their professors, just what was so
“progressive” about the emerging Progressive Era?8
The Gilded Age/Progressive Era dichotomy also obscures very substantial
continuities over the period between the 1870s and 1920s. These include,
to mention just one key example, legal exclusion of Asian immigrants
Dewey W. Grantham, Southern Progressivism (Knoxville, 1983); William A. Link, The Paradox
of Southern Progressivism, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, 1992).
7
Walter LaFeber, The American Search for Opportunity (New York, 1993), and Thomas
Shoonover, Uncle Sam’s War of 1898 and the Origins of Globalization (Lexington, KY, 2003).
8
One strain of Progressive Era historiography emphasizes social control, and by this argument segregation, disfranchisement, and imperialism may all be defined as “progressive”
initiatives. By going this route, however, historians of progressivism have created a narrative
muddle. If people who worked for racial justice, disfranchisement and segregation, immigrant
restriction, immigrant assimilation, imperialism, and anti-imperialism were all progressives,
then we are simply saying that American politics was lively in the first two decades of the
twentieth century, involving many competing interests and visions. That was true, but equally
or perhaps even more true of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. See footnote 22, below, for more
on this debate.
6
466 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
combined with large-scale immigration from all parts of Europe, both of
which characterized the entire period (starting most notably with Chinese
Exclusion in 1882, though it had precursors like the Page Act) up to 1924.9 I
will limit myself here to a necessarily partial account of grassroots movements
and policymaking. Other historians may wish consider whether it would be
useful, in their own fields, to abolish the Gilded Age and adopt the model of
a Long Progressive Era, beginning in the 1870s and ending in the 1920s or
quite possibly with the New Deal.
In considering whether the so-called Gilded Age was truly marked by
“stalemate” and “paralysis,” a good place to begin is with concrete policy
achievements. Despite the persistent idea that government stagnated before
1900, recent scholarship shows that the late nineteenth century was by no
means an era of laissez faire. The Civil War era witnessed sweeping expansions
of government power for new ends, and the postwar decades were marked by
struggles over those expansions and proposals for many more. While much
innovation occurred at the municipal and state levels, federal achievements
were substantive. U.S. civil service reform began with the Pendleton Act in
1883. Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, the Hatch Act
that same year, and the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890. The U.S. Post Office
introduced a critical series of innovations, including Railway Mail, bulk
postage rates, and finally rural free delivery by 1896. All these developments
fit comfortably into the progressive narrative of professionalization, scientific
expertise, and greater government efficiency and regulation.10 Meanwhile,
in 1894, Congress and President Grover Cleveland enacted a progressive
federal income tax, though this was struck down by the Supreme Court, and
advocates had to work for a constitutional amendment that finally arrived
two decades later. If being thwarted by the Supreme Court keeps one from
being called “progressive,” then legions of twentieth-century reformers will
have to forego their titles, as well; an important continuity was that, with
notable exceptions, the Supreme Court remained hostile to progressive
measures from Reconstruction well into the New Deal.
For overviews, see Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in
American Life (New York, 1990), pt. 2; Walter T. K. Nugent, Crossings (Bloomington, IN, 1992);
Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore (Boston, 1989); Erika Lee, At America’s Gates
(Chapel Hill, 2003); and Sucheng Chan, ed., Entry Denied (Philadelphia, 1991).
10
Richard Bensel, Yankee Leviathan (New York, 1990) and The Political Economy of American
Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York, 2000); Richard R. John, “Recasting the Information
Infrastructure for the Industrial Age” in A Nation Transformed by Information, ed. Alfred D.
Chandler Jr. and James W. Cortada (New York, 2000), 55–105; William R. Brock, Investigation
and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (New York, 1983). Brock
writes in his preface, “I beg reviewers not to use the phrase ‘gilded age’ except to record my
rejection of a meretricious label that has done much to obscure the true character of a period
to which we owe so much” (vii).
9
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 467
The late nineteenth century brought an even greater rising tide of
government innovation at the municipal and state levels. In fact, it is difficult
to draw a clear line between the innovations of Reconstruction and those
that followed. Massachusetts began to investigate unemployment during
the 1870s, the same years when a spate of Granger laws arrived in the
Midwest. Twenty-nine states had created railroad commissions before 1890,
twenty-one had passed antitrust laws, and many others regulated banks,
insurance companies, and public utilities. It may justly be argued that such
boards and commissions—like the Interstate Commerce Commission—
faced overwhelming hurdles and had to be strengthened and reorganized
later on. But one can hardly deny the reform impulse, and the limits of late
nineteenth-century initiatives were often equaled by those passed between
1900 and 1920, few of which pre-empted the need for stronger measures
during the New Deal.11
“Muckraking” journalism also arose well before Theodore Roosevelt
applied that epithet in 1906. Helen Campbell reported on urban tenement
life in the 1880s, and her work in turn influenced Jacob Riis’s How the Other
Half Lives (1890). Ida B. Wells’s investigative reports on lynching in the 1890s
also preceded the rise of Ida Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker. Similarly, it
is hard to cite the work of Lincoln Steffens and Upton Sinclair as stimuli
to progressive thinking and not include Henry George’s Progress and Poverty
(1879), Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888), and Henry Demarest
Lloyd’s Wealth Against Commonwealth (1894). Lloyd, in fact, began his career
with a crusade against Tammany Hall in 1871, joined the Chicago Tribune
in 1872, and wrote prominently on the dangers of corporate monopoly
throughout the 1870s and 1880s. The moment of truth for William Dean
Howells was the hanging of Haymarket anarchists in 1887, after which he
became a leading advocate of social and economic justice.12
Other patterns of grassroots activism also show continuity across the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As noted above, Hull House began
in 1889. The women’s club movement was well underway in many cities by
the 1880s, with some clubs tackling social and political issues. Leon Fink has
shown that the Knights of Labor were busy in the 1880s advocating such
Brock, Investigation and Responsibility; Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government
(Bloomington, IN, 1995); Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America,
1870–1900 (Baltimore, 1984); Richard Sylla, “Experimental Federalism: The Economics of
American Government, 1789–1914” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (New York, 2000), 2:526–41. It is worth noting that
Hazen Pingree, the quintessentially progressive mayor of Detroit, served from 1889 to 1896,
and Illinois governor John P. Altgeld, who clearly fit the progressive mold, had come and gone
by 1897.
12
For coverage of many of these figures, see David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American
Thought and Culture, 1850–1920 (New York, 1995).
11
468 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
progressive urban goals as school funding, affordable mass transit, and garbage
collection. The movement for women’s voting rights arrived prominently on
the national scene in 1869 and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
in the 1870s; ratifications of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Amendments
to the Constitution, circa 1920, are obvious ending points for the stories
of prohibition and women’s suffrage. Meanwhile, nascent environmentalists
were among those who persuaded Congress to designate the world’s first
national park, Yellowstone, in 1872. John Muir wrote about Yosemite in
the late 1860s and early 1870s, and John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Arid
Lands, now an environmentalist classic, appeared in 1878. The Sierra Club
was founded in 1892, the same year that Populists met in Omaha. Recent
scholarship suggests, as well, that Grover Cleveland’s forestry chief, Bernard
Fastow, may deserve as much credit as Gifford Pinchot for the rise of federal
conservation.13
Obviously, all these grassroots movements and initiatives experienced
changes and discontinuities between the 1870s and the 1920s. But the
breadth, complexity, and intensity of grassroots movements and ideas that
arose before 1900 refutes the standard view that they were simply a prologue,
and that the “real” era of reform began after 1900. In many ways, in fact, the
1880s and early 1890s were decades of great activism and political creativity,
while the long decade from 1896 through 1910 was less so. Women’s
suffragists, for example, won four territorial and state victories between 1869
and 1896, but then the movement plunged into a “decade in the doldrums.”14
The reason for this was, in large part, the profound shift in political
13
Leon Fink, Workingmen’s Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983).
On temperance and suffrage, a very partial list includes Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance:
The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia, 1981); Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens:
The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana, 2000);
Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, 1996); Nancy Hewitt,
Southern Discomfort: Women’s Activism in Tampa, Florida, 1880s–1920s (Urbana, 2001); on environmentalism, see Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement (Madison, 1981), and Ted
Steinberg, Down to Earth (New York, 2002).
14
Maureen Flanagan, for example, dates the start of the Progressive Era to the 1890s but
argues that the Knights of Labor, Farmers Alliances, and Populists were not progressives for
these reasons: They were backward- rather than forward-looking; they focused on “one group
or issue,” while progressives “worked to develop a comprehensive reform program”; and
the period after their demise was characterized by a larger “variety of reform groups . . . and
numbers of people involved.” This seems to me to get it backwards. Perhaps more middleclass Americans became politically engaged after 1900, but the Populists were a cross-regional,
mass-based political movement with a broad-based platform. Progressive reform groups that
worked for such reforms as the direct election of U.S. senators, abolition of child labor, and
preservation of wildlife were no less “single-issue” than the Populists, and probably more so.
Maureen A. Flanagan, America Reformed: Progressives and Progressivisms, 1890s–1920s (New York,
2007), 9–10. On the “decade in the doldrums,” see Rebecca Edwards, Angels in the Machinery:
Gender in American Party Politics from the Civil War to the Progressive Era (New York, 1996), chs. 7–8.
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 469
power that occurred in 1894 and 1896. The overwhelming Republican
victories of those years must be taken into account as a turning point in
any narrative of national political development, and if there is any place to
demarcate the start of a new era, it might lie here. Republicans had lost their
Reconstruction dominance in 1874, when Democrats’ stunning gains in the
midterm elections gave them control of the House of Representatives by
a large margin. Between that date and 1894, partisan control of the Senate
and House switched several times; no president served more than one
consecutive term. During these years, the size and makeup of Congress and
the Electoral College were also remarkably unstable, due to the resurgence
of ex-Confederates, the entry of new western states, and rapid population
growth (which increased the number of U.S. representatives from 293 in
1880 to 356 in 1893). By contrast, after their sweeping victories in 1894 and
1896, Republicans controlled the White House, Senate, and House all the way
through 1911. When power shifted again, it did so completely: From 1913 to
1917, Democrats took their turn as the party controlling the executive branch
and both houses of Congress.15
This transformation in the political landscape helped some initiatives
advance more easily, after the more friendly party held comfortable control,
but it also set serious limits on the post-1896 agenda. Was the era of close
party competition really one of “stalemate” and “paralysis”? If so, how does
one account for victories like Pendleton, the Interstate Commerce Act, and
Sherman Antitrust? Did Theodore Roosevelt, after his accidental elevation
to the presidency in 1901, single-handedly erase the conservative impact of
the 1894–96 realignment, initiating a whole new era?16 I am not persuaded,
though it is possible that one’s views on the existence of a Progressive Era
beginning around 1900 rest largely, in the end, on one’s assessment of TR.
To organized labor the Republican ascendancy was, on the whole, bad news,
occurring in conjunction with the Supreme Court ruling In re Debs (1894),
which gave corporations free rein to use injunctions to demobilize strikes.17
As noted above, the women’s suffrage movement also fared poorly in the
decade of one-party control. One long-term result was to push grassroots
reformers away from party-based activism, which had been more productive
in the period of competitive elections and narrow partisan majorities. After
1900, groups like the National American Woman Suffrage Association and
15
Kenneth C. Martis, Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress (New York,
1989).
16
For example, Eric Rauchway, “William McKinley and Us,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 4 (July 2005): 235–54, argues against McKinley as a progressive figure. In his book
Murdering McKinley (New York, 2003), Rauchway joins others in depicting Theodore Roosevelt
as the key figure whose ascendance marks the start of the Progressive Era.
17
David Ray Papke, The Pullman Case (Lawrence, KS, 1999).
470 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
Anti-Saloon League more often chose nonpartisan approaches, though the
rise of the Socialist and Progressive parties seriously complicates this story.
One of the most enduring and frequently cited divides between the Gilded
Age and Progressive Era—and one that rests squarely on the 1894 and
1896 elections—is the defeat of Populism. Historians have long described
Populism as a farmers’ revolt, while progressivism is identified as an initiative
of the urban middle classes. Recent scholarship breaks down this distinction
from two directions. First, in Roots of Reform, Elizabeth Sanders traces a critical
agrarian role in the passage of federal legislation during the Progressive Era.
By documenting who sponsored and voted for specific bills, she finds an
“agrarian statist agenda” that endured from the 1870s all the way up through
the New Deal. As Glenda Gilmore has written, Sanders’s “stunning analysis”
refocuses our attention on rural progressives and “suggest[s] that we may be
struggling with the question ‘Who were the Progressives?’ for some time to
come.”18
While Sanders identifies a strong agrarian element in progressivism, other
authors have located progressive strains within agrarianism. Michael Kazin’s
A Godly Hero offers a refreshing portrait of William Jennings Bryan, the great
agrarian who helped Democrats transform themselves into a modern, statebuilding party. Connie Lester traces strong continuities between Populists
and progressives in Tennessee. Charles Postel’s new Bancroft Prize–
winning book, The Populist Vision, also depicts Populists as modernizers and
entrepreneurs—in short, as progressives. Noting that agrarian revolt was only
one component of Populism, Postel emphasizes the significant contributions
of labor and middle-class reformers to the cause. He argues that “the
righteous, progressive, and modern society of the Populist imagination was
to be built on empirically revealed and scientifically established truth.”19
If any single theme characterizes debates over the meaning and
definition of progressivism and the Progressive Era, it is neglect of the
agrarian contribution. From its title, for example, it would appear that
Michael McGerr’s book A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive
Movement, 1870–1920 might integrate the Populists (and even Greenbackers)
into a vision of progressive state-building. McGerr does touch briefly on
the Grange and Farmers’ Alliance in an opening chapter called “Signs of
Friction.” But, alas, here is his first mention of the Populists: “The vote totals
of the People’s Party, the greatest political expression of agrarianism, had
Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago, 1999); Glenda Gilmore, ed., Who Were the Progressives? (Boston, 2002), 20.
19
Michael Kazin, A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan (New York, 2006); Connie
Lester, Up From the Mudsills of Hell: The Farmers’ Alliance, Populism, and Progressive Agriculture in
Tennessee, 1870–1915 (Athens, GA, 2006); Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York, 2006),
21.
18
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 471
lurched downward from a million in the presidential election of 1892 to a
mere 50,000 in the national contest of 1900.” So when we meet the Populists,
they are “dogged by weakness and internal division” and “suffer[ing] from
a . . . sense of defeat and decline.” Yet, in defining progressivism, McGerr
says that it was a movement for “control of big business,” “amelioration
of poverty,” and “purification of politics.”20 Surely the Populists articulated
those goals? One sympathizes with Kansas Populist Frank Doster, who
observed in the early twentieth century that progressive-minded Republicans
were “highway robbers” who had “sandbagged old-time Populists in broad
daylight and robbed them of all their issues.”21 In textbooks all over America,
the Populists are still getting robbed.
With luck, historians like Sanders, Kazin, Lester, and Postel will finally
help rural folks gain entry into the progressive club. This might be helpful
in more ways than one. To the extent that scholars continue to define
progressivism as a phenomenon that appeared between 1900 and 1920, they
are having a terrible time making it cohere. Some scholars despair, admitting
that they have little “expectation of gluing back together the fragments of
the conceptual entity that used to be called the ‘progressive movement.’”
In a recent synthesis, Maureen Flanagan identifies four key strands of
progressivism but cautions that the groups she describes “are not intended
to be identified as the progressives . . . nor should they be seen as defining
progressivism; rather, they . . . often articulated ideas and programs that
other Americans could adopt, reject, or refine to meet their own needs and
ideas.” Even after textbook writers have shunted off the “angry farmers,”
disfranchisement, segregation, and imperialism into other chapters, the
chapter called “Progressivism” still tends to feature fuzzy language about
the movement being “inconsistent and contradictory,” the “sheer variety
of reform initiatives and the contrast of motives mak[ing] it difficult for
historians to interpret this age,” and Progressivism being “at Odds with
Itself.”22 I submit that the average student is going to have a tough time
making sense of this for the final exam.
Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America,
1870–1920 (New York, 2003), xiv, 29.
21
Michael J. Brodhead, Persevering Populist: The Life of Frank Doster (Reno, NV, 1969), 143.
22
Robert Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform, and the New American State (New York, 2004),
11; Flanagan, America Reformed, viii. Textbooks cited are Ayers et al., American Passages, 631,
693; Murrin et al., Liberty, Equality, Power, 658; and Limerick et al., This Land, 594–96. On this
debate, see also Linda Gordon, “If the Progressives Were Advising Us Today, Should We
Listen?” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 1 (Apr. 2002): 109–21; Peter Filene, “An
Obituary for the ‘Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970): 20–34; and
Daniel T. Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982):
113–32. These debates, including various obituaries and requiems, have not in fact displaced
usage of the terms “progressivism” and “Progressive Era.”
20
472 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
Perhaps it would be useful to broaden our vision. Instead of looking for
consistency inside Populism and progressivism, both of which were sprawling
and protean movements (and probably, in the case of progressivism, not
one coherent movement at all), we could step back and look for themes
and threads extending across the entire period between 1877 and 1920, or
perhaps even 1932. This long era was characterized by economic and political
integration within and beyond the boundaries of the United States and by
substantive policy innovation, though at no time did state-building achieve
the ambition and scope that would characterize the New Deal. What did
mark the Long Progressive Era was a diverse, creative array of proposals
for expanding government power and institutional capacity. This period also
witnessed struggles over the United States’ new identity as a multiracial society
and over whether people of color (including not only African Americans, but
also Asians and Latinos) had equal citizenship rights; the dramatic entry of
women into the public sphere and an extended debate over whether they
had equal citizenship rights; a series of Protestant adjustments, including
both creative and reactionary responses, to increasing religious pluralism and
the challenges posed by science and consumer culture; and the use of new
technologies of communication and transportation to build national and
international alliances of reform and protest.
A Long Progressive Era could incorporate the Grange and the Greenbackers
in a story that points in the direction of the New Deal. Discontinuities within
the period could be acknowledged if we identified an Early Progressive Era,
running from about 1880 to 1894, and a Late Progressive Era, roughly dating
from 1894 to 1920. What divided these was the cataclysmic depression of
1890s, Republicans’ resulting electoral triumph, and Theodore Roosevelt’s
unexpected ascendancy, all of which shifted the course of state-building
and reform in various ways. But, though these crucial events shifted the
channels of the great reform river between 1894 and 1901—narrowing here,
deepening there—historians should not look for the river’s source in 1900 or
even the 1890s. It was already flowing deep and wide.
It is tempting to carry the Long Progressive Era forward all the way to the
New Deal. Stopping at 1920, for example, marginalizes Robert La Follette’s
Progressive Party of 1924, which wove together agrarian, socialist, and other
political strands into a movement that was in some ways more ambitious
(though less electorally successful) than the Progressive Party of 1912. The
Great Depression and New Deal probably represented for most Americans—
from Henry Flagler all the way down to the South’s poorest tenant farmers—
the clearest turning point in the early twentieth century. So there may be an
argument for trying to pull together all the material from Reconstruction
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 473
through the New Deal as a coherent whole.23 But I have already overstepped
my own license to practice history, which expires around 1917, and I leave it
to historians of the 1920s to consider whether that decade should be part of
a Long Progressive Era, if such an idea were adopted.
A biologist colleague observed to me that when it comes to categorizing
birds as distinct species or subspecies, all ornithologists are either “lumpers”
or “splitters.” Historians probably come in the same two categories, more or
less, and the above proposal qualifies me as a lumper extraordinaire. Any effort
to suggest such a paradigm shift in four-thousand words must, of course,
be tentative and partial. It is my hope that other historians will take up the
discussion.
I will just note here, briefly, two benefits that might accrue if we abolished
the Gilded Age and began thinking about the late nineteenth century as part
of a Long Progressive Era and if we eventually persuaded non-scholars to
adopt the same view. First, political commentators who argue that we now
live in a “New Gilded Age” would have to confront the fact that social and
economic inequality, selfish uses of wealth, and indifference to the poor have
characterized most eras of U.S. history, not just the first three decades after
the Civil War. That would suggest how intractable these problems really are.
Commentators would thus have to look beyond the modest achievements
of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and perhaps even beyond
the New Deal, as models for reform. They might discover in the Early
Progressive Era not “paralysis” and “stagnation,” but an array of radical
ideas potentially worth revisiting. As the American political landscape is now
in upheaval (to my astonishment, someone in my neighborhood just spraypainted “NATIONALIZE OIL” across the back of his pickup truck), it
might be a propitious moment to make the effort.
Another benefit would be far more modest but closer to home for
readers of this journal. SHGAPE may be the most ungainly acronym in the
historical profession. Whenever I identify myself as a member of SHGAPE,
this information is met with incredulity (and sometimes a snicker). If the
Gilded Age became part of the Progressive Era, SHGAPE could become
SHPE, which could be pronounced either “ship” or “shape.” Whether this
would make the historiography more ship-shape is another question. But
I hope recent scholarship is promoting renewed attention to the challenge
of periodization and that this will spark continued reflection on whether
using the term “Gilded Age” is the most useful way to think about the late
nineteenth-century United States.
23
See Perry, “Men Are from the Gilded Age,” which cites recent work on progressive
continuities in the 1920s, and Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform,
1890–1935 (New York, 1991), which suggests an end date of 1935, with the passage of Social
Security.
474 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
Who Were the Gilders? And Other
Seldom–Asked Questions about
Business, Technology, and Political
Economy in the United States, 1877–
1900
By Richard R. John, Columbia University
Historians of the United States have for many decades termed the late
nineteenth century the “Gilded Age.” No consensus exists as to when this
period began and ended, or how it might best be characterized. Most textbook
authors place the origins of the Gilded Age around 1877 and its demise
around 1900. Few would deny that this period witnessed a host of epochal
innovations that included the rise of the modern industrial corporation,
the building of large-scale technical systems, including the electric power
grid, and the creation of governmental institutions that were conducive to
rapid industrialization. Yet the significance of these innovations remained
a matter of dispute. This essay contends that no synthetic account of the
late nineteenth-century United States that aspires to be at all comprehensive
can ignore these innovations—innovations that have come to be known by
various names such as the “managerial revolution,” the “Second Industrial
Revolution,” and “modernization.”1 It further contends that the reluctance of
some of the most respected historians of business, technology, and political
economy to embrace the Gilded Age construct raises questions about its
utility as a periodizing device.2
1
Robert J. Gordon, “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure up to the Great Inventions of the
Past?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Autumn 2000): 49–74.
2
To be sure, the Gilded Age construct is not without its defenders even among historians
of business, technology, and political economy. The social historian–turned–business historian Richard White has recently invoked it in a nonincidental way, as did the legal historian
Michael Les Benedict. Even so, its most resolute champions remain social and cultural historians interested primarily in social relationships and cultural values. These include social historian Richard Schneirov and cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg. For White, the construct
underscored the centrality of financial speculation to railroad-building (the Gilded Age as
an age of speculative finance); for Benedict, the continuing vitality of the common law (the
Gilded Age as a “golden age”). Schneirov, in contrast, used it to highlight the emergence of
capital-intensive corporations (the Gilded Age as the first chapter in American capitalism);
Trachtenberg used it to highlight the moral bankruptcy of business culture (the Gilded Age
as institutionalized hypocrisy). Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 19–43;
Michael Les Benedict, “Law and Regulation in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” in Law as
Culture and Culture as Law: Essays in Honor of John Phillip Reid, ed. Hendrik Hartog et al. (Madi-
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 475
The reluctance of historians of business, technology, and political economy
to conceive of the late nineteenth century as a Gilded Age is manifested in
their reluctance to characterize the people responsible for these innovations
as “gilders.” Historians of the 1790s routinely write about the “federalists,”
while historians of the 1900s have long tried to identify precisely who
deserves to be regarded as “progressive.” Historians of the late nineteenth
century, in contrast, have failed to reach a consensus as to what to call its
dramatis personae, let alone what made them distinctive.
In one sense, this is unsurprising. The magnitude of the late nineteenthcentury innovations in business, technology, and political economy were so
enormous, and their effects so far reaching, that it would seem unlikely that
a single group of people could have brought them about. Indeed, it may
well be the very momentousness of this transformation that helps to explain
why the “Gilded Age” construct has proved so enduring. The construct is
so open-ended, and its meaning so vague, that it can embrace a variety of
phenomena.
To be sure, there has long been a consensus among social and cultural
historians that a more or less coherent group—long known as “businessmen”
or, more recently, the “bourgeoisie”—dominated center stage. Yet with a few
notable exceptions, in describing this group, historians who do not specialize
in business, technology, or political economy tend to fall back on language
that has changed little since the 1930s, when journalist Matthew Josephson
published his muckraking expose of “robber barons.”3 Popular journalists
are, if anything, even more inclined toward hyperbole: “The Age of Betrayal”
screamed one recent analysis of the “The Triumph of Money in America,
1865–1900.”4
Historians of business, technology, and political economy have long
regarded the popular fascination with the machinations of late nineteenthcentury businesspeople with mixed emotions. On the positive side, it has
goaded textbook authors into including at least a thumbnail sketch of certain
well-known businesspeople. Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, and John D.
Rockefeller are so well known that it would seem foolhardy to leave them out.
Indeed, there may well be no other period in U.S. history in which textbook
authors find themselves obliged to include at least a cursory discussion of what
son, WI, 2000), 227–63; Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital
Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era
5 (July 2006): 189–224; Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the
Gilded Age (New York, 1982).
3
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1865–1901 (New
York, 1934); Josephson, The Politicos, 1865–1896 (New York, 1938).
4
Jack Beatty, The Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865–1900 (New York,
2007).
476 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
specific businesspeople actually did. Contemporaries reached an analogous
conclusion. “It is a notorious fact,” declared Maryland congressman David
J. Lewis in 1914, articulating a common view, “that since the Civil War the
history of our country has not been the narrative of social institutions, but
a stirring story of the gigantic achievements of individuals in the domain
of private finance.” It was easier to remember a half-dozen of this era’s
financiers, Lewis lamented, than to recall the names of the presidents of the
United States.5
On the negative side, all this attention has come at a cost. In no other
period in U.S. history is the actual conduct of businesspeople more likely to
be caricatured. At least part of the problem can be traced to the propensity
of historians who do not specialize in business, technology, and political
economy to characterize the late nineteenth century as the Gilded Age. This
construct implies that this period was distinctive, if not unique, in the extent to
which it was characterized by vulgarity, materialism, and political corruption.
And more often than not, these evils are blamed on businesspeople—they
set the tone for public life, or so it is assumed. The phrase “Gilded Age,”
it is worth remembering, is the only widely used periodization that that is
unambiguously pejorative—even “Cold War,” after all, has its defenders.
Yet was, in fact, the late nineteenth century uniquely vulgar, materialistic,
and corrupt? This question is rarely asked, yet a plausible case can be made
that it was not. The vulgarity of the 1870s greatly troubled journalists such
as E. L. Godkin and Henry Adams; many decades later, the entire period
between 1865 and 1900 earned the opprobrium of cultural critics Van Wyck
Brooks and Lewis Mumford. Indeed, it was Brooks and Mumford who in
the 1920s popularized the notion that the late nineteenth century had been a
“Gilded Age.”6 (Though the phrase “Gilded Age” had been coined by Mark
Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in a satirical novel that they published in
1873, it remained largely confined to this novel and the play based on it until
Mumford and Brooks decided that this phrase best captured the spirit of the
age.)
That Godkin, Adams, Brooks, and Mumford found late nineteenthcentury public life vulgar is hard to dispute. Yet should we take them at
word? The late nineteenth century witnessed the establishment of a large
number of notable cultural institutions that included art museums, concert
halls, and public libraries. Is the Brooklyn Bridge a lesser achievement than
Pennsylvania Station? Is Central Park inferior to Mount Auburn Cemetery?
Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 19, 1914), 1797.
On the considerable and often pernicious influence of E. L. Godkin’s editorials on American historical writing, see William M. Armstrong, “Godkin’s Nation as a Source of Gilded Age
History: How Valuable?” South Atlantic Quarterly 72 (Autumn 1973): 476–93.
5
6
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 477
Questions like these highlight the perils of relying on aesthetic criteria in
venturing historical claims. Few eras in U.S. history have escaped ridicule
on aesthetic grounds—yet fashions change. Mumford, for example, hailed
the Chicago skyscraper as a harbinger of modernity while deriding the New
York skyscraper as a throwback to the past. While Mumford’s assessment
was conventional wisdom for several decades, a more recent generation
of cultural historians have rendered a very different verdict. The Chicago
skyscraper, cultural historians now contend, was not only more ornamental
(or “gilded”) than Mumford presumed; in addition, it typically had little
relationship with the buildings in its immediate environs—a serious defect
in a postmodern age.7
Was the late nineteenth century uniquely materialistic? Here too, the verdict is
mixed. No one would deny that many late nineteenth-century businesspeople
craved luxury, built ostentatious mansions, and lavishly invested—often at
the insistence of their wives—in expensive furniture, clothing, and art. Yet
did this really set them apart from businesspeople in the early republic? Or,
for that matter, did it distinguish them in a fundamental way from wealthy
Americans in any decade from the seventeenth century to the present? The
nouveaux riches, after all, have always been with us. In Tocqueville’s America, not
only English visitors but also American social critic James Fenimore Cooper
bewailed the commercial excesses of mushroom aristocrats; similar critiques
have been leveled at the 1920s, the 1950s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. What
historian would seriously entertain the proposition that the late nineteenth
century was the only epoch in which large numbers of Americans yearned
to get rich quick? Indeed, in at least one sense, late nineteenth-century
businesspeople may well have been more civic-minded than the “overclass”
of today. After all, with a few notable exceptions, they invested their money
in the United States rather than abroad.
Similar objections can be raised with respect to the textbook conceit that
public life in the late nineteenth century was uniquely corrupt. Once again, one
wonders, compared to what? Lawmakers in the 1850s have been persuasively
characterized as a “plundering generation”; a similar epithet could be hurled
at the Jacksonians in the 1830s, the Republicans in the 1920s, or lawmakers
from either party in any decade. The administration of James Buchanan
(1857–61) was, in retrospect, no less corrupt than the administration of
Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77)—Credit Mobilier notwithstanding.8 It may well
Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, 1991), 105–08, epilogue; Thomas
Bender and William R. Taylor, “Culture and Architecture: Some Aesthetic Tensions in the
Shaping of Modern New York City” in Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and
Literature, ed. William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock (Baltimore, 1987), 189–219.
8
Mark Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849–1861
(New York, 1987). See also Margaret Susan Thompson, The “Spider Web”: Congress and Lobbying
7
478 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
require a willing suspension of disbelief to characterize late nineteenthcentury lawmakers as high-minded moralists, yet this conclusion has been
cogently defended by one of the most judicious of the current generation of
political historians.9 And if one shifts one’s gaze from the federal government
to the states and municipalities, then the administrative achievement of the
age becomes even more impressive. Here, or so the historians of state and
municipal governments have long contended, lay the cradle of the modern
administrative state.10
Even if one concedes that the late nineteenth century was, in certain
respects, vulgar, materialistic, and corrupt, one additional problem with
the Gilded Age construct remains. And this is the problem of agency. The
very reluctance of historians to inquire as to who the “gilders” might be has
encouraged the presumption that the period witnessed an epochal struggle
between the many and the few. Despite the best efforts of business historians,
historians of technology, and historians of political economy to demonstrate
the diverse and often antagonistic interests of the business elite, even gifted
scholars routinely assume that the late nineteenth-century business elite was
more or less monolithic and that reform impulses came not from within, but
from without—and, in particular, from farmers and workers.11
This stark people-versus-the-interests duality has made it hard to appreciate
the extent to which the business elite was itself divided. Two examples will
make my point. The characterization of rapacious businesspeople as “robber
barons” originated with and was popularized not by farmers and workers, but
by the consummate insiders C. F. Adams Jr., and Josiah Quincy Jr. Adams
and Quincy were both scions of prominent revolutionary-era families. Like
many businesspeople, they derided certain business practices of railroad
leaders Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jay Gould.12 The antimonopoly movement,
similarly, received its principal inspiration not from the radical journalist
in the Age of Grant (Ithaca, NY, 1985). For an attempt to measure corruption, see John Joseph
Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History” in Corruption and Reform:
Lessons from America’s Economic History, ed. Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin (Chicago,
2006), 23–62.
9
Charles W. Calhoun, “The Political Culture: Public Life and the Conduct of Politics” in
The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Calhoun (Lanham, MD, 2007),
239–64.
10
William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–
1900 (New York, 1984); Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America,
1870–1900 (Baltimore, 1984).
11
Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York, 2001); Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), ch. 4, and Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews
in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 123–24.
12
Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York 1949), 3:23; “The
Freight Convention,” New York Times, May 8, 1873.
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 479
Henry George, but, rather, from merchants and shippers outraged at the
prices that telegraph and railroad managers were charging them to move
information and goods.13
The one-dimensional characterization of the late nineteenth-century
business elite is, in part, a product of the disinclination of business historians
and historians of technology to pay more than incidental attention to the most
hated businessperson of the age: the financier. For the novelist Theodore
Dreiser, the financier was the archetypal businessman. For business historians
and historians of technology, he remains, with a few exceptions, a cipher.
The most notorious nineteenth-century financier was Jay Gould. Though
the main contours of Gould’s career have long been well known, he appears
only as a bit player in Alfred D. Chandler’s Visible Hand, still the single most
penetrating analysis of American business in the late nineteenth century. For
Chandler, the late nineteenth century was neither a Gilded Age—a phrase
he rarely used—nor an age that could be justly characterized as marking
the triumph of “finance capitalism.” Rather, in Chandler’s view, the period
witnessed a managerial revolution spearheaded largely by middle managers,
a cohort of businesspeople whom contemporaries rarely demonized and
historians previously ignored.14 Chandler credited Gould with twice forcing
railroad leaders to build huge horizontal combines, but not much else. He
ignored, for example, Gould’s conviction that the value of corporate securities
should be based on their future earning power rather than their sunk cost,
a radical idea in Gould’s day, yet a commonplace one today. Today Gould is
sometimes hailed as a pioneering venture capitalist; Chandler, in contrast, did
not treat him as indispensable to the period’s momentous restructuring of
the economy.15
If Chandler marginalized financiers, the historian of technology
Thomas P. Hughes displaced them. Unlike Chandler, Hughes had little
quarrel with Matthew Josephson’s characterization of late nineteenthcentury businesspeople as rapacious and narrow-minded robber barons, a
David Nasaw, “Gilded Age Gospels” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in
a Democracy, ed. Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 123–48; George H.
Miller, Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison, WI, 1971): Lee Benson, Merchants, Farmers, and
Railroads: Railroad Regulation and New York Politics, 1850–1887 (Cambridge, MA, 1955).
14
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business
(Cambridge, MA, 1977). For a related discussion, see Richard R. John, “Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians,” Business History Review 82 (Summer 2008): 227–40.
15
Charles R. Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P.
Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York, 2005). For a more judicious position,
which credits Gould with kind of innovations that Alfred D. Chandler Jr. ascribed to corporate managers, see Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore, 1986), and Albro
Martin, “The Good That Men Do: A Review Essay,” Business History Review 60 (Autumn,
1986): 469–73.
13
480 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
characterization that Chandler emphatically rejected.16 Indeed, as David
Hounshell has elegantly demonstrated, Hughes’s analysis of the late
nineteenth-century business corporation presupposed a Veblenian duality
between business and industry.17 The corporation, in Hughes’s view, was a
mere component of the large technical system; only after system-builders like
Thomas Edison and Samuel Insull had already laid the foundations of the
modern electrical grid would venal financiers convince them to overreach.18
Chandler marginalized financiers, and Hughes displaced them. The
historian of political economy Richard Bensel, in contrast, localized them
in a distinctive, sectionally based political economy. Bensel’s financiers were
a tiny minority of the electorate who lacked a popular mandate. Even so, by
artfully navigating the treacherous shoals of national politics, they attained a
major objective: retention of the gold standard. The Gilded Age construct,
in Bensel’s view, obscured their achievement, since it exaggerated the
nationwide reach of what was, in fact, a tiny, largely New York–based elite.
Cross-class, sectionally based political alliances, Bensel believes, defined the
late nineteenth-century political economy, a reality obscured by the notion of
a Gilded Age.19
This survey of historical writing on business, technology, and political
economy demonstrates, I hope, that the Gilded Age has outlived its
usefulness. It is almost always a mistake to view an era in relationship to
the era it preceded, rather than the era that it followed. Yet despite the best
efforts of certain of its defenders, the Gilded Age seems destined to remain
inexorably linked not only with the Progressive Era and a cultural critique
launched in the 1920s, but also with the New Deal–era reevaluation of the
late nineteenth-century political economy. The distinctiveness of the late
nineteenth century will remain obscure so long as we view it through such a
distorting lens. It is time, in short, to drop the Gilded Age from the historian’s
lexicon and to write a history of the late nineteenth century that is as richly
variegated as the age itself.
Thomas Parke Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm,
1870–1970 (New York, 1989).
17
David A. Hounshell, “Hughesian History of Technology and Chandlerian Business History: Parallels, Departures, and Critics,” History and Technology: An International Journal 12:3 (1995):
205–24.
18
Thomas P. Hughes, “From Firm to Networked Systems,” Business History Review 79 (Autumn 2005): 587–93.
19
Richard Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (New York,
2000); Richard Bensel to Richard R. John, personal communication. The intellectual historian
George M. Fredrickson has reached an analogous conclusion: The “Gilded Age” construct
was deficient and should be abandoned because it left out the South; Fredrickson, “Nineteenth-Century American History” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed.
Anthony Molho and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton, 1998), 166.
16
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 481
Comments
By Richard Bensel, Cornell University
Before engaging the critiques and recommendations that Rebecca Edwards
and Richard John have so forcefully and provocatively offered us, we should
remind ourselves of what is at stake in this debate. And what is at stake
is simultaneously “a little” and “a lot.” And that is because periodization
schemes are as much a creature of academic sociology as they are intellectual
and analytic constructs. As the several references to “textbook chapters” in
these essays indicate, nothing is more central to the construction of American
history as an intellectual and academic community than the textbook used
in undergraduate survey classes. From that perspective, the goal of these
critiques is to reconceive the chapter in these surveys now usually dedicated
to the period following the Compromise of 1877 up to the end of the
nineteenth century. Rebecca would reconceive that chapter by linking the
earlier period to what we now commonly regard as the Progressive Era in
the early twentieth century. Richard would banish the misleading and rather
gaudy adjective “Gilded,” replacing it with, as I understand him, something
like the Age of Industrialization.
There is much more at stake here than the mere title and boundaries of a
chapter in a survey textbook. Titles tell the reader what to expect within the
text and, because the author anticipates that expectation from the reader,
they become a kind of sieve or filter when the author goes about gathering
and synthesizing material for that text. What seems relevant to the title goes
in and what appears to be beside the point stays out. Seen this way, Rebecca’s
recommendation proposes that politics take center stage in the chapter
dedicated to this period. From this perspective, she very skillfully contends
that the chapter should be dedicated to tracing the linkages between, on the
one hand, the reform movements that we know as Greenbackers/Populists
/Knights of Labor and the progressives, on the other. She suggests that the
present periodization all too easily allows us to assume that “the Populists
just up and died” in 1900, conveniently tying up one chapter and allowing the
next one, highlighting the progressives, to begin a new theme.1 In a sense, she
1
For example, see John Mack Faragher et al., Out of Many: A History of the American People,
combined ed. (Saddle River, NJ, 1997). Chapter 20 (“Commonwealth and Empire, 1870–
1900”) devotes a number of pages to the Populist Party and reform movements, but the
next chapter (“Urban America and the Progressive Era, 1900–1917”) contains almost nothing
connecting the politics of the latter period to the former. In fact, the opening line of this
chapter reads as if progressives were an entirely new group in American politics and society:
“Between the 1890s and World War I, a large and diverse number of Americans claimed the
political label ‘progressive’” (653). Also see George Brown Tindall and David E. Shi, America:
482 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
wants to eliminate the boundary now demarcating the division between the
Gilded Age and Progressive Era chapters because it is analytically deceptive. I
heartily endorse that conclusion. And I also heartily endorse her more or less
explicit suggestion that politics and public policy should play central thematic
roles in the chapters dedicated to the period between the end of the Civil
War and World War I (possibly continuing, as she notes, into the New Deal).
Richard, for his part, appears comfortable with crafting a period dating
from about 1877 to 1900. He would, however, change the narrative content
of most textbook accounts of the period by including as central elements the
organizational, political, and economic innovations that made rapid industrial
development possible. In particular, he would have us focus upon the rise
of the immense communication, transportation, and energy systems that
provided much of the infrastructure enabling industrialization. In fact, as he
notes, these systems, along with the emergence of the modern corporation
as an organizational template for coordinating economic production and
marketing, comprised much of the substance of industrialization as well.
The problem, from Richard’s perspective, is that the now hoary title
“Gilded Age” encourages authors and readers to conjure up caricatures of
the innovative and enterprising entrepreneurs who put these systems together
and founded the corporations that encompassed their operations.1 Instead of
the robber barons who do depressingly animate the national stage in current
narratives, he would have us focus upon these systems, corporations, and the
theoretical strategies of the people who created them. This revision of the
traditional narrative would also stress the rise of the administrative state that
imposed a common organizational form upon what was, for the most part,
A Narrative History, 6th ed. (New York, 2004), in which the first sentence to chapter 24 (“The
Progressive Era”) states: “Theodore Roosevelt’s emergence as a national leader coincided with
the onset of what historians have labeled the Progressive Era (1900–1917)” (967). We should,
however, note that Tindall and Shi do explicitly connect the populist and progressive movements at several points (889, 969). In yet another example, James A. Henretta, David Brody,
and Lynn Dumenil’s America: A Concise History, 3rd ed. (Boston, 2006), “Politics in the Age
of Enterprise, 1877–1896” (ch. 19) is immediately followed by “The Progressive Era” (ch.
20). Chapter 19 fully integrates the “Populist Revolt” into a narrative of protest against the
excesses of industrialization, while chapter 20 begins with the sentence: “On the face of it, the
political tumult of the 1890s ended with William McKinley’s election in 1896.”
1
Tindall and Shi, for example, entitle their chapter 22 “Gilded Age Politics and Agrarian
Revolt.” At the same time, chapter 20 (“Big Business and Organized Labor”) in their volume
nominates Jay Gould as the “prince of the railroad robber barons,” yet does not stress corruption and fraud, while describing the entrepreneurial and organizational achievements of
Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan. In Henretta
et al., America, there are references in several chapters to the “Gilded Age,” but these neither
dominate the narrative nor do they stress corporate greed and fraud as an underlying theme.
Yet the authors also do not devote much space to industrialization as organizational innovation or economic expansion. They prefer, instead, to focus on the social history of the period,
particularly workers and labor unions.
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private enterprise. In some cases, the robber barons that populate current
narratives would reappear in his revision—but as economic innovators as
opposed to corrupt speculators. But the thrust of his critique is that we
should narrate the now largely overlooked story of how the United States
became one of the leading industrial powers of the world, as opposed to
the scandalous excesses of fraud and corruption that were merely incidental
to that achievement. And I heartily concur with both this critique and the
recommended revision.
In short, Rebecca would stress politics when narrating the last quarter
of the nineteenth century. She would particularly emphasize the continuity
of reform movements and their claimants in that period with those that
now populate accounts of the decades immediately following the turn
of the century. Richard would stress what we might call the “mechanics”
(in both senses of that word) of industrial expansion, including some of
the administrative effects of the reform movements that Rebecca would
privilege. As I have already said, I like both of these recommendations and
the critiques upon which they rest. Furthermore, I believe that they can be
combined to their mutual benefit. In order to see how we might do this, we
must first return to the main reason why we must have periods at all.
The standard survey is, in large part, the product of the several interpretive
communities that have divided up American history into separate periods. To
a large extent, these communities go their own separate ways as they pursue
themes and problems peculiar to their own practitioners and the periods in
which they work. While the standard survey almost always has an overarching
theme of some sort (lodged securely in the title of the textbook), the
separate chapters also at least nod in the direction of the distinct and separate
preoccupations of these separate interpretive communities. And there are
good reasons for this. For one thing, those who teach the undergraduate
survey (and will thus be adopting the text) would like to see their own
period treated in a way that agrees with their own approach. In addition,
the scholarship upon which the chapter rests will be freshest and deepest if
the period is treated from the same perspective as that taken by the resident
interpretive community. But the result, if the textbook is considered as a
whole, is often a bit of a hodgepodge or potpourri in that these communities
(and their periods) are preoccupied by distinctly different problems. That is
why, in so many surveys, “the Populists just up and died” after 1900. Those
historians who call the Progressive Era their home have had no use for the
Populists. In fact, making a firm distinction between the Populists and the
progressives has been a strategy in which they have defended the integrity
of their own turf. And all of this also suggests that Rebecca and Richard,
however much I agree with them (and that is a lot), could be accused of a bit
484 Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era / October 2009
of special pleading themselves.
The problem, as I see it, is the standard American survey itself. One possible
solution would be to craft surveys along interpretive lines that cross the
separate periods. And such surveys, of course, exist with respect to American
economic history, to take but one example. But this merely replicates the
disjunctive influence of the interpretive communities that preside over the
separate periods, albeit within one narrower, more focused range of the
American experience. What we need, instead, is a solution that liberates
the focus of each period from the interpretive community that produces
the scholarship. We could, for example, ask what Americans (in particular,
American undergraduates) most want to know about each of the periods
and let their interests determine the content and approach. While this, in
fact, does influence textbook adoption (via sales), there would probably be
something a little incestuous in this strategy in that many undergraduates
would not know what most interested them about a period before they were
exposed to it and the selective presentation of a theme by the textbook and
the professor would, in many cases, merely be self-confirming.
What I would suggest, instead, is that we let scholars outside the United
States tell us what they would most want to know about this country’s
history. This would largely free each chapter, however defined, from the
possession of its interpretive community while, I would guess, providing a
question around which to organize what that interpretive community can tell
us about that period. For instance, I would wager and wager strongly that
what scholars outside the United States would most want to know about the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is how this country managed
to combine a rather robust democratic politics with comparatively rapid
industrialization. The compatibility of democracy and development is, for
example, a central question in many rapidly developing nations, nowhere
more so than in China. And answering that question would necessarily entail
combining and integrating Rebecca’s and Richard’s critiques into a single
narrative that would, also and not at all incidentally, significantly revise what
we now relate to readers under the rubric Gilded Age. This would probably
not solve most disjunctive problems, because foreign readers would likely
have very different questions that they would pose to each of the separate
periods. But it would address some of the rather incestuous qualities of
contestation over the interpretive themes that are applied to them.
I am, of course, skeptical that this strategy would, in fact, achieve the
result that we all want to see because, in the first place, the survey textbook
is an industry (and a powerful industrial product) that operates on sales,
and the sales of a textbook written from the cosmopolitan perspective
of foreign interests and questions would probably not compete well with
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”? 485
more parochial alternatives. In fact, the complex of academic sociology and
publishing economics will probably trump even the strongest intellectual
critiques favoring alternative interpretive themes. So I am rather pessimistic
that things are going to change soon.
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