Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T00:27:23.517Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-18981

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Richard Schneirov
Affiliation:
Indiana State University

Extract

There was once a time in the not too recent past when scholarly discussion and debate over periodization was central to the task of writing and thinking about the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Scholars such as Richard Hofstadter, Robert Wiebe, and Samuel P. Hays applied versions of modernization theory to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to produce what came to be known as the “organizational synthesis.” A competing periodization centered on the rise of the large business corporation appeared in works by Martin Sklar, James Weinstein, and James Livingston. Since the 1970s, however, the new social and cultural history has introduced a multitude of new fields and perspectives. By the 1980s, the perceived fragmentation of history had generated an appeal for “synthesis.” In 1986 Thomas Bender called for new and intelligible narrative plots that would transcend “recent scholarship with its intensive specialization, fragmentation, and preoccupation with groups.” Yet, since then, occasional attempts to synthesize have been stillborn, and for the Gilded Age as well as for the Progressive Era the search for synthesis seems to have reached a cul-de-sac with no exit in sight.

Type
Forum
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

2 Wiebe, Robert H., Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, Age of Reform (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., Response to Industrialism 1885-1914 (Chicago, 1957)Google Scholar; Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44 (Autumn 1970): 279–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hays, Samuel P., “The New Organizational Society,” in Building the Organisational Society: Essays on Assodational Activities in Modern America, ed. Israel, Jerry (New York, 1972), 115Google Scholar; Weinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (Boston, 1968)Google Scholar; Livingston, James, Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (Ithaca, NY, 1986)Google Scholar; Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890-1916: The Market, The haw, and Politics (Cambridge, UK, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Thomas, Bender, “Wholes and Parts: The Need for Synthesis in American History,” journal of American History, 73 (June 1986): 120–36Google Scholar, quotes at 120 and 136; see also A Round Table: Synthesis in American HistoryThe Journal of American History, 74 (June 1987)Google Scholar; for Bender's latest thinking see Strategies of Narrative Synthesis in American History,” American Historical Review 107 (February 2002): 129–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is noteworthy that the most important recent attempt at periodization of the Gilded Age came from a political scientist rather than a historian; see Bensel, Richard Franklin, The Political Hconomy of American Industrialisation, 1877-1900 (Cambridge, UK, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 The dependence of periodization on research-relevant theory can be off-putting to historians. Many historians are suspicious of theory, which they view as a way of fitting the variety of the past into a procrustean bed of dead concepts. The problem with this empiricist position is that whether historians acknowledge it or not, history is an intrinsically theoretical enterprise. Implicitly, even the empiricist historian undertakes an investigation that operates within a field of assumptions that determine what questions to pose, where to look for answers, and what would constitute satisfactory answers to them. On the other hand, some historians believe that there is no way to argue successfully for the superiority of one periodization scheme or master narrative over another; moreover, to do so would inevitably silence, stifle, or marginalize competing alternative narratives that also exist. The problem with this view is that rules constituting objectivity are necessary to the existence of any scholarly discipline or community of inquirers whether in the field of history or the sciences. For the argument against objectivity see Novick, Peter, That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, UK, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and White, Hayden, “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality,” in The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987)Google Scholar. For arguments in favor see Haskell, Thomas L., “Objectivity Is Not Neutrality: Rhetoric Versus Practice in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream,” History and Theory 29 (1990): 129–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Hollinger, David, “T. S. Kuhn's Theory of Science and Its Implications for History,” in In the American Province: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas (Bloomington, IN, 1985)Google Scholar.

5 Sklar, Martin J., “Periodization and Historiography,” in The United States as a Developing Country: Studies In U.S. History in the Progressive Era and the 1920s (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 2, 3, 68CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Burnham, Walter Dean, “Pattern Recognition and ‘Doing’ Political History: Art, Science, or Bootless Enterprise?” in The Dynamics of American Politics: Approaches, ed. Dodd, Lawrence C. and Jillson, Calvin, (Boulder, CO, 1994)Google Scholar, and Periodization Schemes and ‘Party Systems’: The ‘;System of 1896’ as a case in Point,” Social Science History, 10 (1986): 263314Google Scholar.

6 , Sklar, “Studying American Political Development,” in U.S. as a Developing Country, 4555Google Scholar; Tipps, Dean C., “Modernization Theory and the Comparative Study of Societies: A Critical Perspective,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 15 (1973): 199226CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 On the developmental mix see , Sklar, “Periodization and Historiography,” 820Google Scholar; on social formation see Hindess, Barry and Hirst, Paul, Mode of Production and Social Formation: An Auto-Critique of Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London, 1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The amalgamation and interpenetration of modes of production and classes is a commonplace among social historians of the transition from feudalism to capitalism; see, for example, Moore, Barrington Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1966)Google Scholar. Sean Wilentz views antebellum American society as a “mix” of modes of production; see “The Rise of the American Working Class, 1776-1877” in Perspectives on American Labor History: The Problems of Synthesis, ed. Moody, J. Carroll and Kessler-Harris, Alice (De Kalb, IL, 1989), 83151Google Scholar, esp. 91.

8 The literature on the cross-class rather than single-class character of transformative political movements is too vast to catalog here. For the Civil War, see Foner, Eric, Tree Soil, Tree Labor, Tree Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the CM War (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. For the Progressive Era, Filene, Peter, “An Obituary for the ‘Progressive Movement,’” American Quarterly 22 (Spring 1970): 2034CrossRefGoogle Scholar, has led most historians away from single-class explanations and toward broadly political ones, such as Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998)Google Scholar. In Sklar's trenchant formulation: “[C]lass conflicts and changing class relations, corresponding with developing modes of production, generate conditions and pressures for changes of profound effect, but emergent cross-class alignments transact them,” (italics in original). See “Periodization and Historiography,” 19.

9 Lessoff, Alan, “The Gilded Age: The Provenance of a Usable Past,” paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Boston, March 26, 2004.Google Scholar

10 Twain, Mark and Warner, Charles Dudley, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (New York, 1873)Google Scholar; Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons; the Great American Capitalists, 1861-1901 (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Mumford, Lewis, The Brown Decades: A Study of the Arts in America, 1865-1895 (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Garraty, John A., The New Commonwealth, 1877-1890 (New York, 1967), 1, 3Google Scholar (Parrington quote), and 4; Santis, Vincent De, “The Gilded Age in American HistoryHayes Historical Journal 7 (1988): 3841Google Scholar.

11 Chandler, Alfred D., Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the American Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, MA, 1962)Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New York, 1955)Google Scholar, “Introduction”; Merton, Robert K., “Manifest and Latent Functions,” in Social Theory and Social Structure (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Gutman, Herbert G., “Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919,” in Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1977)Google Scholar.

12 , Wiebe, Search for OrderGoogle Scholar; , Hofstadter, Age of ReformGoogle Scholar; , Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis,”Google Scholar and , Hays, “The New Organizational Society.”Google Scholar For a critique see Cmiel, Kenneth, “Destiny and Amnesia: The Vision of Modernity in Robert Wiebe's The Search for Order,” Reviews in American History 21 (June 1993): 352368CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York, 1982).Google Scholar

14 Fulbrook, Mary, Historical Theory (London, 2002)Google Scholar. Painter, Nell Irvin, Standing At Armageddon: The United States, 1877-1919 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar; Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; on neo-Populism see for example, McGerr, Michael E., The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York: 1986)Google Scholar, Ritter, Gretchen, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (New York, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar, and , Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of AmericaGoogle Scholar, all of which posit a nineteenth-century golden age of the small producer and associated politics against which twentieth-century developments appear like a declension. For a criticism of the same tendency in Gilded Age labor history see Schneirov, Richard, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Uberalism in Chicago, 1864-97 (Urbana, 1998), 410Google Scholar; also see the criticisms of Incorporation of America in the special issue of American Literary History 15 (2003)Google Scholar.

15 Woodward, C. Vann, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951)Google Scholar; Wright, Gavin, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986)Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; for a survey of debates on the nature of late-nineteenth-century economic and social relations in the South see Marler, Scott P., “Fables of Reconstruction: Reconstruction of the Fables,” Journal of the Historical Society 4 (Winter 2004): 113–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 , Hofstadter, Age of Reform, chap. 1Google Scholar; Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

17 Degler, Carl, Out of Our Vast: The Forces That Shaped Modern America (New York, 1959), 1.Google Scholar

18 Merrill, Michael, “Cash is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 4 (1977): 4271Google Scholar; Henretta, James A., “Families and Farms: Mentalite in Pre-Industrial America,” William and Mary Quarterly 35 (Jan. 1978): 332CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Atack, Jeremy and Bateman, Fred, To Their Own Soil: Agriculture in the Antebellum North (Ames, IA, 1987), quote at 203Google Scholar; Danhoff, Clarence H., Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820-1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 21Google Scholar.

20 Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Wilentz, Sean, “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815-1848” in The New American History, ed. Foner, Eric (Philadelphia, 1990)Google Scholar; Stokes, Melvyn and Conway, Stephen, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800-1880 (Charlottesville, VA, 1996)Google Scholar.

21 Clark, Christopher, “The Consequences of the Market Revolution in the American North”Google Scholar in , Stokes and , Conway, The Market Revolution in America, 29Google Scholar.

22 The American debate takes off from a debate about the European origins of capitalism; for an introduction and a critique of the commercialization thesis see Wood, Ellen Meiksins, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (New York, 1999)Google Scholar; Kulikoff, Allan, “The Transition to Capitalism in Rural America,” William & Mary Quarterly 46 (January 1989): 120–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, quote at 140; , Attack and , Bateman, To Their Own Soil, quotes at 267Google Scholar and 273. Naomi O. Lamoreaux has recently questioned the usefulness of the methods used by moral economy historians; see “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” journal of American History (September 2003): 437–61Google Scholar.

23 Marx, Karl, Capital: A Critical Analysis of Capitalist Production, Vol. I, ed. Engels, Friedrich (New York, 1967), 146–55Google Scholar; , Marx, Capital, Vol. III, 807Google Scholar. The M-C-M formula should not be taken as a sufficient definition of capitalism as it omits the question of the social relations of production.

24 Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 1957), chaps. 310Google Scholar; Dobb, Maurice, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York, 1947)Google Scholar; Macpherson, C.B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York, 1962), 5170Google Scholar; , Wood, Origins of CapitalismGoogle Scholar; Haskell, Thomas J., “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts 1 and 2” in The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Bender, Thomas (Berkeley, 1992)Google Scholar. Among other things, all the above thinkers reject the equation of capitalism with commerce or the market.

25 Engels, Friedrich, Supplement to CapitalGoogle Scholar, Vol. III: “Law of Value and Rate of Profit,” 891-910, esp. 896-900 in Capital, Vol. III; more recendy see Livingston, James, “Marxism and the Politics of History: Reflections on the Work of Eugene D. Genovese,” Radical History Review 88 (Winter 2004): 3048CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Marx's definition of capital accumulation see Capital, Vol. I: “A Critique of Political Economy,” chap. 25. For a discussion of “petty commodity production” in American agriculture, which concludes after considering alternatives that it was a distinct mode of production, which also aided the transition to capitalism, see Post, Charles, “The American Road to Capitalism,” New Left Review 133 (1982): 3051Google Scholar.

26 On simple commodity production as a mode of production see Wood, Ellen Meiksins, Peasant-citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London, 1988)Google Scholar; Nicholson, Linda J., Gender and History: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (New York, 1986), 114–21Google Scholar; , Livingston, “Marxism and the Politics of History,” 3435Google Scholar. The term “patriarchal” refers here to a historical formation rooted in a male-dominated, family-based mode of production, while “male supremacy” denotes the transhistorical phenomenon of male domination.

27 Huston, James L., Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1998), chap. 1Google Scholar. Pocock, J. G. A., “Virtue and Commerce in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972): 119–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a survey of the scholarship on republicanism see Rodgers, Daniel T., “Republicanism: Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 1138CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 , Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, chap. 2.Google Scholar

28 See, notably, Kellogg, Edward, Labor and other Capital and the Wrongs of Both Eradicated (orig. 1849, repr. New York, 1971)Google Scholar; on Kellogg's importance in working class radicalism see Destler, Chester McArthur, “The Influence of Edward Kellogg Upon American Radicalism, 1865-96,” Journal of Political Economy 40 (June 1932): 338–65Google Scholar.

30 , Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor, 125–28.Google Scholar

31 Atack, Jeremy, “Economies of Scale and Efficiency Gains in the Rise of the Factory in America, 1820-1900,” in Quantity & Quiddity: Essays in U.S. Economic History, ed. Kilby, Peter, Atack, Jeremy, and Lebergott, Stanley (Middletown, CT, 1987), 320–22Google Scholar; 327 (quote); definitions of firm categories at 287-88 n. 3; Laurie, Bruce and Schmitz, Mark, “Manufacture and Productivity: The Making of an Industrial Base, Philadelphia, 1850-1880” in Philadelphia: Work, Space, Family, and Group Experience in the 19th Century, ed. Hershberg, Theodore (New York, 1981)Google Scholar, find an absence of productivity increases due to economies of scale in the 1850-1880 period.

32 Gordon, David M., Edwards, Richard, and Reich, Michael, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (Cambridge, UK, 1982), 8185Google Scholar; see also Gallman, Robert, “Commodity Output, 1839-1899” in Trends in the American Economy in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1960), 34Google Scholar; Sokoloff, Kenneth L., “Was the Transition from the Artisanal Shop to the Small Factory Associated with Gains in Efficiency? Evidence from the US Manufacturing Censuses of 1820 and 1850,” Explorations in Economic History 21 (October 1984): 351–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an interpretation of this era based on the persistence of the old middle class see Bledstein, Burton J. and Johnston, Robert D., eds., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American Middle Class (London, 2001)Google Scholar.

33 Montgomery, David, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market During the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 13Google Scholar; Foner, Eric, “The Idea of Free Labor in Nineteenth-Century America” in Tree Soil, Tree Tabor, Tree Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (repr. New York, 1995), xv–xviGoogle Scholar and chap. 1, quote at xxxvi; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the US, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, 1975), vol. 1, 138–39Google Scholar; Golden, Claudia and Sokoloff, Kenneth, “Women, Children, and Industrialization in the Early Republic: Evidence from the Manufacturing Census,” journal of Economic History 42 (December 1982): 747Google Scholar, 751-56; Clawson, Dan, bureaucracy and the Tabor Process: The Transformation of U.S. Industry, 1860-1920 (New York, 1980), 7377Google Scholar.

34 Marx, Karl, CapitalGoogle Scholar, Vol. II, “The Process of Circulation of Capital”; 35 Livingston, James, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850-1940 (Chapel Hill, 1994), xvi, 521Google Scholar, and 31-49; Gallman, Robert E., “Gross National Product in the United States, 1834-1919” in Output, Employment, and Productivity in the United States After 1800: Studies in Income and Wealth, Volume Thirty (New York, 1966), 34Google Scholar, Table A-3; Williamson, Jeffrey G., “Watersheds and Turning Points: Conjectures on the Long-Term Impact of Civil War Financing,” Journal of Economic History 34 (September 1974): 638, 654CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 , Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, chap. 2Google Scholar; Porter, Glenn and Livesay, Harold C., Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth Century Marketing (Baltimore, 1971), 96115Google Scholar, 131-53; , Post, “The American Road to Capitalism,” 4651Google Scholar.

36 , Porter and , Livesay, Merchants and Manufacturers, 119–30Google Scholar; Sharkey, Robert P., Money, Class, and Party: An Economic Study of Civil War and Reconstruction (Baltimore, 1959), chap. 3Google Scholar; Unger, Irwin, The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865-1879 (Princeton, NJ, 1964), chaps. 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 5; Coben, Stanley, “Northeastern Business and Radical Reconstruction: A Re-examination,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review Ad (June 1959): 6790Google Scholar; , Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 2634Google Scholar.

37 , Williamson, “Watersheds and Turning Points.”Google Scholar

38 , Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialisation, 8791Google Scholar; Eichengreen, Barry, Globalising Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, NJ, 1996), 3842Google Scholar; O'Rourke, Kevin H. and Williamson, Jeffrey G., Globalisation and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 220–23Google Scholar; , Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System, 71102Google Scholar.

39 Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie (Cambridge, MA, 2001), chaps. 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 8, quote at 211; the making of an upper class on the urban level in this period is also explored in Baltzell, E. Digby, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Glencoe, IL, 1958)Google Scholar, and Jaher, Frederick Cople, The Urban Establishment: Upper Strata in Boston, New York, Charleston, Chicago, and Los Angeles (Urbana, 1981)Google Scholar. For a non-class, pluralistic interpretation of the urban scene in this period see Hammack, David C., Power and Society, Greater New York at the Turn of the Century (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.

40 On Chicago developments in this and the following paragraphs see Schneirov, Richard, “Class Conflict, Municipal Politics, and Governmental Reform in Gilded Age Chicago, 1871-75,” in German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850-1910: A. Comparative Perspective, ed. Keil, Helmut and Jentz, John B. (De Kalb, IL, 1983), 183205Google Scholar, and Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1863-97 (Urbana, 1998), chaps. 23Google Scholar.

41 This periodization of the political recognition of class divisions differs from that of David Montgomery's dating of that recognition to the Reconstruction Era in Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-72 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar.

42 , Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, chap. 6Google Scholar; on New York see Shefter, Martin, “Trade Unions and Political Machines: The Organization and Disorganization of the American Working Class in the Late Nineteenth Century” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns on Western Europe and the United States, ed. Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R. (Princeton, NJ, 1986), 270–71Google Scholar; , Montgomery, Citizen Worker, 154–56Google Scholar; on the west see Enyeart, John P., “The Exercise of the Intelligent Ballot: Rocky Mountain Workers, Urban Politics and Shorter Hours, 1886-1911Labor 1 (Fall 2004): 4569CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Woodward, C. Vann, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction (1951; repr. Boston, 1966)Google Scholar; , Garraty, The New Commonwealth, 1877-1890Google Scholar; Ginger, Ray, Age of Excess: The United States from 1877 to 1914 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Morgan, H. Wayne, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877-1896 (Syracuse, NY, 1969)Google Scholar; , Painter, Standing at ArmageddonGoogle Scholar. On the other hand, see Cashman, Sean, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; for a survey see Santis, De, “The Gilded Age in American History.”Google Scholar

44 Reich, Michael, “Capitalist Development, Class Relations, and Labor History” in Perspectives on American Labor History, 4345Google Scholar, 49-51 ; Williamson, Jeffrey G., Late Nineteenth-Century American Development, A General Equilibrium History (Cambridge, 1974), 73Google Scholar.

45 U. S. House of Representatives, Investigation by a Select Committee of the House of Representatives Relative to the Causes of the General Depression in Labor and Business: And as to Chinese Immigration, 46th Cong., 2d sess. (Washington, 1879), 56Google Scholar; Hadley, Arthur T., “Over-Production,” Cyclopaedia of Political Science and Political Economy 3 (1884): 4043Google Scholar; Wells, David A., decent Economic Changes (New York, 1889), quote at 25-26; 27-28, 6769Google Scholar.

46 , Sklar, Corporate Reconstruction, 2033Google Scholar, 43-47; Gordon, Edwards, and , Reich, Segmented Work, Dirided Workers, 9499Google Scholar, 101-03; Livingston, James, “The Social Analysis of Economic History and Theory: Conjectures on Late-Nineteenth Century American Development,” American Historical Review 92 (February 1987): 6995CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fels, Rendig, American Business Cycles, 1865-1897 (Chapel Hill, 1959)Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, The Fall of the Home of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (Cambridge, UK, 1987), 214–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Kleppner, Paul, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, 1979), chap. 4Google Scholar; , Schneirov, “Class Conflict and Governmental Reform"Google Scholar; Silbey, Joel H., The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, 1991), 219Google Scholar; for an excellent survey see Calhoun, Charles W, “The Political Culture: Public Life and the Conduct of Politics” in The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Calhoun, Charles W (Wilmington, DE, 1996), 185213Google Scholar.

48 , Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialisation, xixGoogle Scholar, xxi, chaps. 5-7; , Woodward, Reunion and ReactionGoogle Scholar; Jensen, Richard, Illinois: A Bicentennial History (Urbana, 1978)Google Scholar.

49 Huston, James L., “A Political Response to Industrialism: The Republican Embrace of Protectionist Labor Doctrines,” journal of American History 70 (June 1983): 3557CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shefter, Martin, “Regional Receptivity to Reform: The Legacy of the Progressive Era,” Political Science Quarterly, 98 (Autumn 1983): 459–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Burnham, Walter Dean, “Political Immunization and Political Confessionalism: The United States and Weimar Germany,” journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972): 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wolfinger, Raymond E., “Why Political Machines Have Not Withered Away and Other Revisionist Thoughts,” Journal of Politics 34 (May 1972): 365–98CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 , Sharkey, Money, Class, and Party, chap. 5Google Scholar; , Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 340–56Google Scholar.

51 On investment in labor-saving machinery and later scientific management colliding with the interests of skilled workers see Montgomery, David, Workers Control in America (New York, 1979)Google Scholar; Gordon, Edwards, and , Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers, 113–26Google Scholar and , Livingston, “Social Analysis of Economic History”Google Scholar; on the events of the 1870s see Gutman, Herbert G., “The Failure of the Movement by the Unemployed for Public Works in 1873,” Political Science Quarterly 80 (June 1965): 254–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar; , Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 5356Google Scholar, chap. 3; Jentz, John B., “Class and Politics in an Emerging Industrial City: Chicago in the 1860s and 1870s,” Journal of Urban History 17 (May 1991): 227–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In his survey of labor history scholarship Sean Wilentz concludes that only during the 1870s depression were “the first clear signs of national working class presence” evident, see “The Rise of the American Working Class, 1776-1877,” 84-85, 128-34.

52 Commons, John R. and Andrews, John B., “Introduction” in A Documentary History of American Industrial Society, Vols. 9–10, ed. Commons, John R., et al. (New York, 1958)Google Scholar; on the wages-fund theory see Dickman, Howard, Industrial Democracy in America: Ideological Origins of National Labor Relations Policy (La Salle, IL, 1987), chap. 5Google Scholar; Hovenkamp, Herbert, Enterprise and American Law, 1836-1937 (Cambridge, MA, 1991), chap. 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 , Ira-Steward, “A Reduction of Hours An Increase of Wages,” Fincbers Trade Review, Oct. 14, 1865Google Scholar; Senate, U.S., Testimony Taken by the Committee of the Senate upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital, 4 vols. (Washington, 1885)Google Scholar.

54 Senate, U.S., Committee upon the Relations Between Labor and Capital, Vol. I, 459–60Google Scholar; see also Strasser editorial in Cigarmakers' Official journal, July 1885Google Scholar.

55 Referring to “the accumulation of wealth” Samuel Gompers wrote: “Do what you will, declaim as you may, industrial and commercial development cannot be confined within the limits of laws enacted to fit past decades the theories of which are sought to be applied to modern conditions.” See The Lesson of the Recent Strikes,” The North American Review 159 (August 1894): 205Google Scholar; also see Gompers, Samuel, “Attacking the Trusts,” American Federationist, (December 1896Google Scholar) and White's, Henry and Gompers's testimony in Chicago Conference on Trusts, (Chicago, 1900), 324–30Google Scholar; Gompers' socialist orientation during the Gilded Age is demonstrated in Kaufman, Stuart, Samuel Gompers and the Origins of the American Federation of Labor: 1848-1896 (Westport, CT, 1973)Google Scholar.

56 The association of this shift in workers' consciousness—evident in the shorter hours movement in this period—with the advent of capitalism is made in Stanley, Amy Dru, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 8990CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for the same point in an earlier period see Brody, David, “Time and Work During Early American Industrialism,” in In Labor's Cause: Main Themes on the History of the American Worker (New York, 1993), 342Google Scholar.

57 Commons, John R., “Introduction to Volumes IX and X,” 26.Google Scholar

58 For example, see Perlman, Selig, A Theory of the Labor Movement (New York, 1929)Google Scholar and more recendy, Arnesen, Eric, “American Workers and the Labor Movement in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in The Gilded Age, 3961Google Scholar.

59 , Montgomery, Beyond Equality, 139–51Google Scholar; , Wilentz, “Rise of the American Working Class, 1776-1877, 124-25, 127–29Google Scholar; Leikin, Steve, The Practical Utopians: American Workers and the Cooperative Movement in the Gilded Age (Detroit, 2005), 2546Google Scholar; , Schneirov, Tabor and Urban Politics, 3940Google Scholar, 307-16; Schneirov, Richard and Suhrbur, Thomas J., Union Brotherhood, Union Town: The History of the Carpenters' Union of Chicago, 1863-1987 (Carbondale, IL, 1988), 16, 2143Google Scholar. By 1915, Theodore Glocker, pointing to a “gradual evolution,” estimated that only 28 of the 133 unions active in the labor movement could still be classified as craft unions; the rest were “craft-industrial”; see Amalgamation of Related Trades in American UnionsAmerican Economic Review 5 (September 1915): 554Google Scholar.

60 Edwards, P. K., Strikes in the United States, 1881-1974 (New York, 1981), 28Google Scholar, Table 2.5, p. 37; , Schneirov, Tabor and Urban Politics, 203–04Google Scholar, 252-55; chap. 5; Montgomery, David, “Strikes in Nineteenth Century America,” Social Science History 4 (February 1980): 81104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 Gordon, Edwards, and , Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers, 113–27Google Scholar; , Williamson, Tate Nineteenth-Century American Development, 198200Google Scholar; , Schneirov, Tabor and Urban Politics, chap. 8Google Scholar; Stromquist, Shelton, A Generation of Boomers: The Pattern of Railroad Tabor Conflict in Nineteenth-Century America (Urbana, 1987), chaps. 3 and 5Google Scholar; Roy, Andrew, A History of the Coal Miners of the United States (Columbus, OH, 1907), 233–37Google Scholar, 241; Ozanne, Robert, A Century of Tabor-Management Relations at McCormick and International Harvester (Madison, WI, 1967), 922Google Scholar.

62 Shannon, Fred. A, The Farmer's Last Frontier, Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New York, 1945)Google Scholar; Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeomen Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1900 (New York, 1983)Google Scholar; on the economics of Populism see North, Douglass C., Growth and Welfare in the American Past: A New Economic History (Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966), 137–48Google Scholar, esp. 142-45; Destler, Chester McArthur, “Agricultural Readjustment and Agrarian Unrest in Illinois, 1880-1896.” Agricultural History 21 (April 1947): 104–16Google Scholar.

63 Goebel, Thomas, “The Political Economy of American Populism from Jackson to the New Deal,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Spring 1997): 109–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kazin, Michael, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Palmer, Bruce, “Man Over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, 1980)Google Scholar; , Hofstadter, Age of Reform, chap. 3Google Scholar; for a recent synthesis see McMath, Robert C. Jr, American Populism, A Social History, 1877-1898 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; for a review of the literature see Holmes, William F., “Populism: In Search of Context,” Agricultural History 64 (1990): 2658Google Scholar.

64 Lowi, Theodore, “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (July 1964): 677715CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCormick, Richard L., “The Party Period and Public Policy,” in The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 197227Google Scholar; Ethington, Philip J., The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (Cambridge, UK, 1994), 299308Google Scholar; , Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialisation, chap. 4Google Scholar.

65 Sklansky, Jeffrey, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920 (Chapel Hill, 2002), 105–36.Google Scholar

66 “What Does Labor Want” in The Samuel Gompers Papers, Vol. 3: Unrest and Depression, 1891-1893, ed. Kaufman, Stuart B. and Albert, Peter J. (Urbana, 1989), 392Google Scholar.

67 Einhorn, Robin, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago, 1991), 925Google Scholar; 195-215; 237-44; , Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, chap. 2Google Scholar; on urban services, investments, and fiscal retrenchment during the Gilded Age see Teaford, Jon C., The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore, 1984), chaps. 810Google Scholar.

68 , Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 99114Google Scholar; 141, 149-51; 168-73; 192-93; 285-88, 342; Ethington also finds a shift to regulatory and redistributive policies relating to labor, see The Public City, chap. 7; on the rise of organized interests' influence on urban governance see , Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, chap. 7Google Scholar; Michael Les Benedict sees laissez-faire constitutionalism as a response to the rise of regulatory and redistributive legislation, see Laissez-Faire and Liberty: A Re-Evaluation of the Meaning and Origins of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism,” Law and History Review 3 (Fall 1985): 293331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Kessler-Harris, Alice, Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United State (Oxford, 1982), 110–15Google Scholar, 141; Woloch, Nancy, Women and the American Experience, 3rd ed. (Boston, 2000), 277306Google Scholar.

70 Baker, Paula, “The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (June 1984): 620–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Sara M., “Women's History and Political Theory: Toward a Feminist Approach to Public Life” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Hewitt, Nancy A. and Lebsock, Suzanne (Urbana, 1993), 119–39Google Scholar; Bordin, Ruth, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Uberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), 95139Google Scholar; Gordon, Linda, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston, 1880-1960 (New York, 1988), chap. 2, esp. 2021Google Scholar, 56-57; , Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, 266–68Google Scholar; Tax, Meredith, The Basing of the Women: Feminist Solidarity and Class Conflict, 1880-1917 (New York, 1980)Google Scholar; Flanagan, Maureen, Seeing With Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1877-1933 (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar; Davis, Allen F., American Heroine: The Life and Legend of jane Addams (New York, 1973)Google Scholar.

71 Polanyi argues that the growth of state regulation, not just to promote accumulation, but to protect society from its ravages, accompanied the expansion of modern markets; see The Great Transformation, 130-34, 161-77; , McCormick, “The Party Period and Public Policy,” 224–27Google Scholar; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1870-1920 (New York, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brock, William R., Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865-1900 (New York, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keller, Morton, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 171–96CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 319-42; Skocpol, Theda, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1995)Google Scholar; , Teaford, Unheralded Triumph, chaps. 5 and 6Google Scholar.

72 The following all date the intellectual and political origins of modern liberalism to the 1880s: , Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Part IIGoogle Scholar; Furner, Mary O., “Knowing Capitalism: Public Investigation, and the Labor Question in the Long Progressive Era,” in The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experience, ed. Furner, Mary Q and Supple, Barry (Cambridge, UK, 1990)Google Scholar; Sklar, , Corporate Reconstruction, 4372Google Scholar; , Dickman, Industrial Democracy in America, chap. 3Google Scholar; , Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics, chap. 11Google Scholar; Glickman, Lawrence, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, NY, 1997)Google Scholar; , Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, chap. 6Google Scholar; Ross, Dorothy, “Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social Thought in the 1880s,” Perspectives in American History 9 (1977-1978): 779Google Scholar; Donohue, Kathleen G., Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Idea of the Consumer (Baltimore, 2003), chaps 1Google Scholar and 2 , McFarland, Gerald W., Mugwumps, Morals, and Politics, 1884-1920 (Amherst, MA, 1975)Google Scholar. Cohen, Nancy, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill, 2002)Google Scholar also views modern liberalism as a Gilded Age construction, but unlike others, depicts it as anti-democratic.

73 Adams, Henry Carter, “The Relation of the State to Industrial Action” in Two Essays by Henry Carter Adams, ed. Dorfman, Joseph (New York, 1954), 57133Google Scholar; Gunton, George, Wealth and Progress: a Critical Examination of the Labor Problem (New York, 1887)Google Scholar; McNeill, Geo. E., The Eight Hour Primer: The Fact, Theory, and the Argument (Washington, 1889)Google Scholar; Gunton, George, The Economic and Social Importance of the Eight-Hour Movement (Washington, 1889)Google Scholar; Danryid, Lemuel, History and Philosophy of the Eight-Hour Movement (Washington, 1889)Google Scholar.

74 , Sklansky, The Soul's Economy, 3.Google Scholar

75 On the social movement origins of corporate capitalism see , Sklar, Corporate ReconstructionGoogle Scholar, “Introduction,” and , Livingston, Origins of the Federal Reserve System, Part IIGoogle Scholar.

76 , Sklar, “Periodization and Historiography,” 2430Google Scholar; Bowman, Scott R., The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: Law, Power, and Ideology (University Park, PA, 1996)Google Scholar; Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977)Google Scholar; Nelson, Daniel, Managers & Workers: Origins of the Twentieth Century Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920 (Madison, WI, 1975)Google Scholar; Jacoby, Sanford, Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900-1945 (New York, 1985)Google Scholar.