1 For comments and suggestions, thanks to Peter Blodgett, Matthew Guterl, Robert Johnston, and Christopher Warley.

2 White, Richard, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)Google Scholar. See for instance White's discussion of the merger movement: “The movement toward centralization and consolidation was not an inevitable development, part of the natural order of things; it was historical, the result of accumulating human actions, networks, laws, and institutions. It was the work of the courts, the work of markets shaped by human hands, the work of corporations, the work of government, and the work of the networks that tied them together” (793).

3 A quick glance at any editorial page shows countless articles like Anne Applebaum, “Are You Still Sure There's No Need to Worry?” Washington Post, Aug. 10, 2018.

4 Historians of the period 1865–1920 debate, frequently in this very journal, whether it is useful to see the Gilded Age and Progressive Era as separate periods. Some push for one long Gilded Age or one long Progressive Era; they emphasize the continuities from the end of the Civil War to the end of World War I. Others hold that there are significant distinctions in ideology, politics, business, and culture between the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. But for all these historians, whether they push for the long Gilded Age or Progressive Era or distinguish between the two, the early twentieth century looks quite different. On the problem of periodization for this period, see Richard Schneirov, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873–1898,” Journal of Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5 (July 2006): 189–224, with responses by Rebecca Edwards and James Huston; Edwards, Rebecca, “Politics, Social Movements, and the Periodization of U.S. History,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 463–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John, Richard R., “Who Were the Gilders? And Other Seldom-Asked Questions about Business, Technology, and Political Economy in the United States, 1877–1900,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 474–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bensel, Richard, “Comments,” in “Forum: Should We Abolish the ‘Gilded Age’?,” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 8 (Oct. 2009): 481–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Steven Hahn also considers periodization at some length in A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York: Penguin Books, 2016)Google Scholar. On periodization more generally, see Sklar, Martin J., “Periodization and Historiography: Studying American Political Development in the Progressive Era, 1890s–1916,” Studies in American Political Development 5 (Fall 1991): 172–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Edwards, Rebecca, New Spirits: Americans in the Gilded Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Lears, Jackson, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper Collins, 2009)Google Scholar.

6 Whitman, Walt, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose, ed. Buell, Laurence (New York: The Modern Library, 1981), 32, 46, 52Google Scholar.

7 Edwards, New Spirits, 4–5.

8 Whitman, Walt, Specimen Days & Collect (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1882)Google Scholar.

9 Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 1, 227, 355.

10 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 6, 857, 475. Howell's phrase “the sufficiency of the common” comes from one of his “Editor's Study” columns for Harper's New Monthly Magazine in which he reviews Nicolay, John G. and Hay, John, Abraham Lincoln: A History (New York: The Century Co., 1886 and 1890)Google Scholar. Howells admired Lincoln without reservation, and he explains Lincoln's greatness not as the result of Lincoln's exceptional qualities but as the result of his perfect ordinariness. Lincoln, says Howells, “was so like all other men, was so essentially human, that if any honest man conceives clearly of himself he cannot altogether misconceive Lincoln.” William Dean Howells, “Editor's Study,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Feb. 1891, 481. White juxtaposes Howells's cautious optimism with Henry Adams's “pessimistic and cynical” response to the election of 1896.

11 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 357.

12 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 359, 360. There were available alternatives to the wild west of fee-based governance. The 1877 Granger Cases, for example, proposed a broader understanding of the public good that could be ensured by a fledgling administrative state rather than self-interested bounty hunters (363). Though anti-monopoly in particular (as here in the Granger Cases) formed an important and continuing alternative throughout the period, it did not dominate in politics, popular thought, or business.

13 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 108, 361, 473. Though White is merciless in his depiction of the Republicans (for good reason), he is no fan of the Democratic Party either. It became, he quips, nothing but “the party of ‘No,’” and, as a party, offered little else (253, 337, 881).

14 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 246, 276, 355.

15 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 391, 389, 394.

16 It was “one of the more unheralded pieces of legislation in American history,” says White in a rare moment of understatement. White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 373–74.

17 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 371, 428, 578, 259, 600. There are many, many more such examples in White.

18 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 337.

19 Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 7Google Scholar. Trachtenberg's sympathetic discussion of the Populists’ so-called conspiracy theories describes them as lucid assessments of contemporary society's growing inequalities. Hardly irrational, he argues, these were built on “at least a generation of political experience,” and, while drawing on messianic language, they “called Satan by his modern name: monopolies and corporations” as well as political corruption (174–175).

20 Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 88–89. Lears hews to a similar line as Trachtenberg in Rebirth of a Nation, although Lears is even less interested in formal politics than is Trachtenberg.

21 I do not mean to suggest that White has many laudatory comments for politics, politicians, or (especially) political parties. He praises neither the Republicans nor the Democrats. He has little good to say about any of the presidents. But politics and parties shaped the parameters of the Gilded Age more than technology, finance, industry, or transportation.

22 Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, 168, 165; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 588.

23 For example, the Gilded Age West, a West defined by violent dispossession of Native peoples, railroads, land speculation, monoculture, homesteading, bankruptcy, irrigation, and mining, was created in Congress through what White calls “some of the most consequential legislation in American history”—the Pacific Railway Acts (1862, 1864), the Homestead Act (1862), and the Morrill Act (1862). All three “sought to create basic infrastructure over roughly two-thirds of the nation's territory.” The actual infrastructure did not appear quickly, but the legislation created the need and eventually the means. White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 117.

24 Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 455; Cashman, Sean Dennis, Americans in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, third ed. (New York: New York University Press, 1993), 360Google Scholar.

25 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 633.

26 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 634–35.

27 Painter, Nell Irvin, Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 90Google Scholar.

28 For instance, Hahn sees the Bland-Allison Act as “a moderate silver policy” that “won out,” while Painter argues that it was a response to “tremendous [and external] popular pressure on Congress in 1877 and 1878 to restore the unlimited coinage of silver”—but that “conservative forces controlling the Senate watered it down.” In the end it was not nothing, but hardly what the many silverites had called for. White, on the other hand, sees the Bland-Allison Act as a sign of silverites’ presence within the legislature and a sign of legislative bungling: everyone wanted something out of it, and no one got anything, except Western mine owners, who profited handsomely. Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 407; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 86–87; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 371.

29 White points out that through the 1880s there was usually an anti-monopoly majority in the House, and he carefully notes that even after the defeat of the Populists/Democrats in 1896, anti-monopoly reform persisted (579, 849).

30 Edwards, New Spirits, 249–50; Hahn, A Nation Without Borders, 402–47; White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 849, 852. White usually scrupulously eschews such separation.

31 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 795–97.

32 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 856, 3, 44, 3, 581, 58, 241.

33 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 113, 46–47.

34 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 113, 293–94, 365.

35 Perhaps if White looked ahead a few years from the early 1870s, when Francis A. Walker became commissioner of Indian affairs (1871) and published “The Indian Question” (1874), he might have revised his opinion of Walker's ideas slightly. For by 1876, when Walker turned his attention to the labor question, he began moving away from doctrinaire liberalism toward something closer to twentieth-century liberalism. In The Wages Question (1888), Walker explored the possibility of government intervention to stabilize the economy and society. Stephen Robert Lecesse, “The Discovery of the Consumer: Economy Reform and Social Regulation, 1865–1904” (PhD diss., Fordham University, 2019), 76–85.

36 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 181.

37 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 118.

38 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 485, 515.

39 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 485, 445, 673, 685, 56, 202, 551. Carnegie may be White's extended example of liberalism gone amuck, but he was hardly the only one to embrace a narrow vision of nation and citizenship. By 1877, when Hayes became president, “homogenous” had ceased to mean “inclusion” and had come either to mean the exclusion of undesirables or the coercive inclusion into the polity under very strict requirements, as with Native people (367).

40 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 444.

41 White's liberalism mirrors that described by Nancy Cohen in The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.

42 Sawyer, Laura Phillips, American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the “New Competition,” 1890–1940 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 88CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on new liberalism, see Sklar, Martin J., The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism, 1890–1916: The Marketplace, the Law, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. 33–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 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: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 171–241Google Scholar; Schneirov, Richard, Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–1897 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 260–91, 370–71Google Scholar.

43 White's argument is in notable contrast to Nell Painter in Standing at Armageddon and to Wiebe, Robert H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill & Wang, 1967)Google Scholar. For new liberalism and reformers, see in particular Furner, “The Republican Tradition” and Schneirov, Labor and Urban Politics

44 Even as Carnegie insisted on its necessity and naturalness, in his own business practice he perhaps unsurprisingly did not embrace competition; he preferred to eliminate it.

45 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 579–80, 363, 451, 447, 689.

46 It is notable that White's discussion of Henry George's Poverty and Progress (1886) is one of the few parts of The Republic that is not immediately crystal clear.

47 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 441, 452. White does not talk at length about George's natural rights republicanism nor consider him as looking forward to a new intellectual tradition. It is George's insistence on new questions—and general refusal to be dogmatic (or consistent) about his prescriptions—that White approves of, as seen in what he calls George's “turn east” to seek “an alliance with workers and immigrants.” White favorably contrasts George with Josiah Strong, clergyman, lecturer, and author of the wildly popular Our Country (1885). George and Strong “shared many of the same evangelical and free-labor impulses: both rooted their anti-monopolism in an older liberalism even as they moved away from many individualist assumptions.” But Strong called for “the Anglo-Saxon race” to realize its God-given gift for “creating wealth” and “its genius for colonizing” in order to propel the United States into a better future. Progress, for Strong, meant narrowing the United States to Protestant Anglo-Saxons and excluding the “European peasant[s]” whose “ideas of life are low.” George, instead, strove to expand the meaning of America and looked for new ways to tackle existing problems, forging alliances with the working class and recent immigrants. White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 571–73; Strong quoted on 573.

48 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 367, 579.

49 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 198, 201, 206, 848, 815, 822.

50 White reminds us that Republican consolidation of power cannot be seen as “synonymous with corporate dominance or the defeat of anti-monopoly.” Even as the Republican Party was most certainly “the party of subsidies, of the tariff, and increasingly of an expanded military,” it was also “the party of the pension, of federal protection of civil rights against state attempts to limit them,” and it had long been “the party of government intervention and welfare.” White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 852, 854. In other words, there is no easy analysis of McKinley's win. Similarly, though Bryan lost decisively, he greatly changed how Americans thought of governance.

51 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 6, 855, 857, 867.

52 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 863, 871.

53 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 871.

54 White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 872.