A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Christopher McKnight Nichols, Nancy C. Unger, Christopher M. Nichols, Nancy C. Unger

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781118913987
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

A Companion to the Gilded Age and Progressive Era presents a collection of new historiographic essays covering the years between 1877 and 1920, a period which saw the U.S. emerge from the ashes of Reconstruction to become a world power.

• The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
• Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties
• Coverage of the period includes geographic, social, cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, ethnic, racial, gendered, religious, global, and ecological themes and approaches
• In today's era, often referred to as a "second Gilded Age, " this book offers relevant historical analysis of the factors that helped create contemporary society
• Fills an important chronological gap in period-based American history collections

Part I
Overview‐Definitions, Precursors, and Geographies

Chapter One
Reconstructing the Gilded Age and Progressive Era

Heather Cox Richardson

No one today is quite sure what time period the Gilded Age and Progressive Era covers. It sprawls somewhere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but few historians can agree on where its edges lie. Some argue for a period that begins in 1865 with the end of the Civil War, or in 1873, with economic overproduction, or in 1877, with the alleged death of Reconstruction (Schneirov 2006). The end of the era is even more problematic. Perhaps the period ended in 1898, when the Spanish–American War launched the nation into imperialism, or in 1901, with the ascension of Theodore Roosevelt to the White House, or in 1917 with the outbreak of World War I or in 1918, with its end. There is even a good argument that it might stretch all the way to the Stock Market Crash in October 1929 (Edwards 2009, 464). In trying to section off the late nineteenth century in America, there is also the problem of figuring out where the Gilded Age and Progressive Era overlaps with the period termed Reconstruction, which everyone agrees was also crucial to the rise of modern America.

Even the names Gilded Age and Progressive Era make historians chafe. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner published The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today in 1873, but the name was not then applied to the era. It was only in the early twentieth century that critics trying to create what one called a usable past, men such as Van Wyck Brooks and Lewis Mumford, called the era from the 1870s to 1900 the Gilded Age. Their intent was to indict the post‐Civil War materialism they despised, although Twain and Warner wrote their book to highlight the political corruption they insisted characterized the early 1870s. The twentieth‐century part of the equation labeled the Progressive Era comes by its moniker more honestly, for contemporaries did, in fact, call themselves and their causes Progressive. But the label was hardly new to the twentieth century.

There was enough confusion over the terms that in 1988, when scholars interested in creating a society to study the late nineteenth and early twentieth century tried to find a name, only 49 of the 97 casting a ballot chose the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; the other options were Society for Historians of the Early Modern Era (1865–1917) or Society for Historians of Emerging Modern America (1865–1917) (Calhoun 2002).

And, again, where does Reconstruction fit? It overlaps significantly with the Gilded Age, and what whites and blacks sought to accomplish in that period certainly exemplified progressive policies.

This historical confusion is bad enough, but it is also missing a vital piece: How did people who lived through the time see their era? Surely, weighing their perspective is important to make sense of the period. And yet, nineteenth‐century Americans did not see as epoch‐making any of the dates commonly used to define those years. For them, some of the period’s most crucial dates were ones that historians rarely use as benchmarks: 1870, when Georgia’s senators and representatives were sworn into Congress, thus formally ending Reconstruction; 1883, when the Supreme Court handed down the Civil Rights Cases, overturning the 1875 Civil Rights Act; 1913, when a Democratic Congress passed and Woodrow Wilson signed a revenue act that shifted the weight of government funding from tariffs to taxes.

The ways scholars periodize the chaos of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflect what they consider its unifying theme. Over that, too, historians argue. Early attempts to come to grips with the history of the late nineteenth century occurred while it was going on, and so were embedded in contemporary culture and politics. The first major study of Reconstruction was written by a key player in the destruction of black rights: when Congressman Hilary A. Herbert and his politician co‐authors wrote Why the Solid South? (1890), they were justifying their suppression of the black vote by “proving” that African Americans had corrupted politics and driven the South into the ground. Herbert’s “scholarly” construction shoehorned Reconstruction into dates that served his argument: 1865, when the Republican Congress began its own process of rebuilding the South, to 1877, when Democratic governments took over the last of the southern states. Those dates, chosen to justify the disfranchisement of black Americans, have perverted understanding of the era until the present, as historians studying Reconstruction have until recently been boxed into the frame dictated by the late nineteenth‐century purveyors of a political travesty. Scholars either endorsed the Herbert thesis or excoriated it, but they accepted its boundaries as the significant ones for Reconstruction.

Setting Reconstruction off as its own unique period warped early studies of the rest of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When historians turned their attention to those years in the early twentieth century, they focused on issues of industrialization as separate from the racial questions of Reconstruction. They also tended to divide the Gilded Age from the Progressive Era, creating distinct periods, albeit ones with fuzzy edges. In this early formulation, the Gilded Age was an era in which unrestricted capitalism enabled wealthy industrialists to run amok, bending the government to their will and crushing workers. The Progressive Era was a reaction to this oligarchical corruption of America, a period in which reformers softened the edges of industrialization and took back the nation for democracy. Most notably outlining this distinction were two classic works: John R. Commons and his associates traced the rise of labor unions in their ten‐volume History of Labor in the United States, published between 1918 and 1935; and Matthew Josephson’s 1934 The Robber Barons traced the concentration of money and power in the hands of grasping capitalists in the late nineteenth century. The exception to this rule was Angie Debo’s landmark And Still the Waters Run, which looked to the western prairies rather than the eastern cities to examine the contours of economic expansion. Her exploration of how legislation marginalized Indians focused on the racial issues that interested Reconstruction historians: she illustrated the way that America’s allegedly color‐blind government codified race into law. She wrote the book in 1936, but it was too controversial to be published until 1940.

The consensus historians who tried to explain American success after World War II did little to redefine the boundaries that had sprung up around three apparently distinct eras between the Civil War and World War I. Their concerns focused on how ideas translated into a distinct American identity, rendering questions of both race and economics to a subordinate status. Instead, consensus scholars like Louis Hartz and Richard Hofstadter tended to play down race and to dismiss the economic strife of the late nineteenth century, bundling all Americans and all eras into a single national narrative characterized by widely shared liberal values. While C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) did take on race, it suggested that it was law, rather than differences Americans developed organically, that created segregation.

Studies of the peculiar era of the turn of the century heated up again in the 1960s. In 1963, scholars launched a reexamination of the period from 1865 to 1900 with a collection of essays edited by H. Wayne Morgan. The studies of politics, labor, currency, and popular culture in The Gilded Age: A Reappraisal brought nuance to a period that had previously been characterized by cartoonish images of robber barons and radical workers. Scholars in this volume also reexamined the traditional periodization of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. This collection of essays suggested that the era should start in 1865. Four years later, David Montgomery’s Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862–1872 challenged scholars of Reconstruction by reading the major concerns of Gilded Age and Progressive Era scholars—concerns about labor and capitalism—into a study of Reconstruction.

But the impulse to erase the boundaries between eras would not last. At the same time scholars were rethinking the late nineteenth century, dynamic new scholarship about the black experience after the Civil War, notably Kenneth Stampp’s The Era of Reconstruction, 1865–1877, published in 1965, set out to demolish Hilary Herbert’s perversion of the era. In doing so, historians set off Reconstruction definitively as its own territory in which issues of race were paramount. This construction of the era as a distinct period in which black Americans and their white allies sought to redefine the nation would last for the next generation, culminating, most notably, in Eric Foner’s 1988 Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. This separation meant that new scholarship on the era maintained the division of Reconstruction from the rest of the period, even as scholars blended and redefined the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

That redefining took place immediately on the heels of the Morgan volume. In the mid‐1960s, two key books insisted that historians focusing on the triumph of conservatism in the Gilded Age and progress in the Progressive Era had the story wrong. They erased the distinction between the two to create new interpretations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gabriel Kolko’s 1965 Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 argued that, far from marking the triumph of popular determination to rein in big business, railroad regulation in the Progressive Era resulted, at least in part, from the demands of the railroad barons themselves. This was a case study of the argument he had made two years before in The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900–1916, whose title summed up the argument that the Progressive Era, popularly interpreted as a victory for the people, was in fact characterized by the triumph of a cultural and economic system that reinforced capitalism. In 1967, Robert H. Wiebe’s The Search for Order, 1877–1920 also erased the boundary between the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era but shifted the focus away from the economic interpretations that had dominated previous studies. Wiebe argued that the period from 1877 to 1920 should be understood as one in which a forming middle class wrenched order out of the chaos of industrialization, transforming a country of isolated small towns into a nation of bureaucrats.

With barriers breaking down, historians of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century banded together to reexamine the era. By 1988, scholars of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era had their own historical society, and in 1996, Charles W. Calhoun’s edited volume, The Gilded Age, brought these new visions together in a set of essays that updated the Morgan volume of the previous generation.

This reexamination of the turn of the century has challenged the traditional understanding of the outlines of the era. Previous studies of labor, for example, had focused on class consciousness, an investigation that required eliding the racial divisions among workers and emphasized the different interests of workers and employers. When Eric Arnesen reintroduced the problem of race to labor studies with his Waterfront Workers of New Orleans: Race, Class, and Politics, 1863–1923 (1991) he complicated the idea of a working‐class consciousness by explaining how black workers and white workers cooperated—or not—depending on circumstances. Lawrence B. Glickman also pushed a new understanding of workers by examining how workers conceived of themselves as consumers. His A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of a Consumer Society (1997) showed how workers shaped the market for their own benefit, and advocated a living wage not as a protest but as a positive adjustment to the modern era. Another crucial reworking of historical understanding of class in the era came from Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, whose Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996) suggested that class lines could blur race lines in the fight for access to equality at the turn of the century.

A reexamination of the Progressive Era also produced a more complicated picture. Many studies followed Kolko in examining how reform exerted social and economic control over workers, especially workers of color, women, or immigrants. Lori D. Ginzberg’s (1990) Women and the Work of Benevolence, for example, examined how a gender‐based movement became a class‐based one. But others emphasized that the era was more radical than conservative. Two notable biographies—Kathryn Kish Sklar’s Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work (1995), and Joan Waugh’s Unsentimental Reformer (1997), a biography of Josephine Shaw Lowell, interpreted their subjects as less interested in social control than in a fundamental reordering of industrial America.

Still, with a few notable exceptions, these studies tended to focus on the period after 1877 and, with the exception of studies of Populism—which ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Gilded Excesses, Multiple Progressivisms
• Part I: Overview‐Definitions, Precursors, and Geographies
• Part II: Sex, Race, and Gender
• Part III: Art, Thought, and Culture
• Part IV: Economics, Science, and Technology
• Part V: Political Leadership
• Part VI: Government, Politics, and Law
• Part VII: The United States and the World
• Part VIII: Major Works and Contemporary Relevance
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement