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Ideology and Politics in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era - Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvii + 312 pp. Notes and index, $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00637-2. - Nancy Cohen. The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xi + 318 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index, $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2670-7; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5354-2. - Michael Perman. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xiii + 397 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2593-X; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4909-X.

Review products

Heather Cox Richardson. The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865–1901. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xvii + 312 pp. Notes and index, $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-00637-2.

Nancy Cohen. The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. xi + 318 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index, $59.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2670-7; $22.50 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5354-2.

Michael Perman. Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. xiii + 397 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2593-X; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-4909-X.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Michael Les Benedict
Affiliation:
Ohio State University

Abstract

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Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2003

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References

1 Ted Ownby, review of Perman, Michael, Struggle for Mastery, in Civil War History 48 (September 2002): 277–78.Google Scholar See also Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore's similar review in the American Historical Review 107 (June 2002): 885–86.

2 Richardson's first book, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997), was initially a Harvard doctoral dissertation prepared under the direction of David Donald.

3 Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

4 Benedict, Michael Les, “Laissez Faire and Liberty: A Re-Evaluation of the Meaning and Origins of Laissez-Faire Constitutionalism,” Law and History Review 3 (Fall 1985): 293331.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Legal and constitutional historians have been especially attentive to the significance of the concept of “class legislation” in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era because of its close connection to the rise of laissez-faire constitutionalism. See Gillman, Howard, The Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Lochner Era Police Powers Jurisprudence (Durham, NC, 1993)Google Scholar; Fiss, Owen M., Troubled Beginnings of the Modern State, 1888–1910, vol. 8 of [the Oliver Wendell Holmes Devise] History of the Supreme Court of the United States (New York, 1993).Google Scholar

5 Benedict, Michael Les, “The Problem of Constitutionalism and Constitutional Liberty in the Reconstruction South,” in An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South, eds., Hall, Kermit L. and Ely, James W. Jr, (Athens, GA, 1989): 225–49Google Scholar and Benedict, , “Reform Republicans and the Retreat from Reconstruction,” in The Facts of Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of John Hope Franklin, eds., Anderson, Eric and Moss, Alfred A. Jr, (Baton Rouge, LA, 1991): 5378.Google Scholar

6 This is certainly the impression one gets from recent work on race and the white working class in the nineteenth century. See Roediger, David R., The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Gronowicz, Anthony, Race and Class Politics in New York City Before the Civil War (Boston, 1998)Google Scholar; Bernstein, Iver, The New York City Draft Riots: Their Significance for American Society and Politics in the Age of the Civil War (New York, 1990)Google Scholar; Amesen, Eric, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 541 passim.Google Scholar

7 Sproat, , “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Fine, , Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict in American Thought (Ann Arbor, MI, 1956)Google Scholar; Forcey, , The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann, and the Progressive Era (New York, 1961).Google Scholar

8 Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970).Google Scholar

9 For example, Berk, Gerald, Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865–1917 (Baltimore, 1994)Google Scholar; Zunz, Oliver, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago, 1990)Google Scholar; Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York, 2001).

10 See White, Morton G., Social Thought in America: The Revolt Against Formalism (New York, 1949)Google Scholar; Fumer, Mary O., Advocacy & Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington, KY, 1975)Google Scholar; Haskell, Thomas L., The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Urbana, 1977).Google Scholar

11 See Furner, Mary O., “The Republican Tradition and the New Liberalism,” in The State and Social Investigation in the United States, eds., Lacey, Michael J. and Furner, Mary O. (New York, 1993): 177241.Google Scholar

12 Of course, one can turn for this information to some of the classic studies of the labor, agrarian, and Populist movements, such as Fink, Leon, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983), esp. 317Google Scholar; Destier, Chester M., American Radicalism, 1865–1901 (New York, 1963)Google Scholar; Pollack, Norman, The Populist Response to Industrial America (New York, 1962)Google Scholar; Goodwyn, Lawrence, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York, 1978)Google Scholar; Palmer, Brace, “Man Over Money ”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980).Google Scholar See also Ritter, Gretchen, Goldbugs and Greenbacks: The Antimonopoly Tradition and the Politics of Finance in America (New York, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Cohen also does not distinguish between classical liberal political economy and the distributive political economy articulated by one of the most influential nineteenth-century American economists, Henry C. Carey. Given her perceptions it is natural for her to dismiss his support of protective tariffs as merely a strange deviation from classical theory. But to contemporaries, his vision of a state actively promoting economic well-being differed radically from the laissez-faire propositions articulated by the liberal reformers Cohen analyzes. See Morrison, Rodney J., Henry C. Carey and American Economic Development (Philadelphia, 1986)Google Scholar and, for the salience of the argument during the Gilded Age, Reitano, Joanne, The Tariff Question in the Gilded Age: The Great Debate of 1888 (University Park, PA, 1994).Google Scholar

13 For an alternative approach, see Ritter, Goldbugs and Greenbacks, in which she describes debates between advocates of the gold standard and advocates of an adjustable currency, with “each program” containing “coherent (though flawed) analysis…informed by broader political concerns and imbued by cultural meanings that reflected some of the primary conflicts of late nineteenth-century American society” (63).

14 Kolko, , The Triumph of Conservatism: A Re-Interpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York, 1963)Google Scholar and Railroads and Regulation, 1877–1916 (Princeton, 1965); Weinstein, , The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968)Google Scholar; Sklar, , The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Market, the Law, and Politics (New York, 1988).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 See Sanders, , Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago, 1999)Google Scholar, which reaches quite different conclusions from Cohen's.

16 Perman specifically mentions Cell, John W., The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (New York, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York, 1984)Google Scholar; and Hale, Grace Elizabeth, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (New York, 1998).Google Scholar

17 Kousser, , The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880–1910 (New Haven, 1974).Google Scholar

18 Perman, Michael, Reunion without Compromise: The South and Reconstruction, 1865–1868 (New York, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and The Road to Redemption: Southern Politics, 1869–1879 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984).