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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 November 2010
I wish to thank the editors of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era for giving me a chance to react to Richard Schneirov's engaging article on periodizing the Gilded Age. I tend to agree with his generalizations and approach to the subject, having only some small qualifications to offer, largely concerning the quest for periodization, the timing of the break from one type of society to another, and the role of the Civil War. It seems that modern historians have revised somewhat the comment of George III to Edward Gibbons, “Scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr. Gibbons?” Now it has become, “Quibble, quibble, quibble, eh, Mr. Historian?” Well, such seems to be our fate. However, on one interpretation there is no quibbling at all: somewhere in the years called the Gilded Age came the mightiest transition that the society of the United States has ever experienced. The quote in the title of this short piece attests to the realization that such was the case: it is from the Brahmin historian, James Ford Rhodes writing about the Great Railroad Strike of 1877: “For we had hugged the delusion that such social uprisings belonged to Europe and had no reason of being in a free republic where there was plenty of room and an equal chance for all.” The political economy inherited from the Revolution had failed, and it was beginning to be recognized that a new political economy was emerging.
1 Rhodes, James Ford, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 (New York, 1895-1922), Vol. 8, 46.Google Scholar
2 Recendy, a debate took place among political scientists concerning the periodization of American political development; the participants were Roger Kersh, Andrew J. Polsky, David R. Mayhew, Elizabeth Sanders, and Byron E. Shafer. Their short comments, from a conference panel on the subject, are printed in “Introduction to Roundtable on Periodization and American Politics,” Polity 37 (October 2005): 510–47Google Scholar.
3 See trenchant comments of Reid, Brian Holden, The Origins of the American Civil War (New York, 1996), 7Google Scholar.
4 , Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900 (Baton Rouge, 1998), tables 2, 3, 89–91.Google Scholar
5 Let me add as a side-note that Schneirov sees the accumulation of capital as the force generating the transition from a small-producer society to a capitalist society. But that was not the only force eroding the small-producer society in North America. Population growth would have eventually created a skewed distribution, not so much by multiplying the numbers at the top of the income pyramid but by multiplying the numbers at the bottom. Population growth has not received perhaps as much attention as it should as one of the major sources of social change in American history. Those living in the Mid-Atlantic states were destined to see a different society arise simply from population pressure, just as Madison foretold.
6 See the remarks, which I accidentally came across of Russell, Bertrand, Authority and the Individual (New York, 1949), 39.Google Scholar Russell, in about one and one-half pages, explains the great change in human experience was the ending of the Jeffersonian ideal of independent proprietorship in the technique of mass production conducted by large corporations.
8 See Ashworth, John, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic, Vol. I: Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850 (Cambridge, UK, 1995), ix-x, 149, 157–66Google Scholar; a good discussion of the problem is Bowman, Shearer Davis, Masters and Lords: Mid-19th-Century U.S. Planters Prussian Junkers (New York, 1993), chap. 3Google Scholar; Wood, Gordon S., “The Enemy Is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,” in Wages of Independence: Capitalism in the Early American Republic, ed. Gilje, Paul A (Madison, 1997), 137Google Scholar.
8 C[ecil] Macpherson, B., The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, UK, 1962), 52–53.Google Scholar
9 Atack, Jeremy and Bateman, Fred, To Their Own Soil: Agriculture in the Antebellum North (Ames, IA, 1987), 202Google Scholar; Danhof, Clarence H., Change in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820-1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 279Google Scholar; Barron, Hal, “Listening to the Silent Majority,” Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century, ed. Ferleger, Lou (Ames, IA, 1990), 3–16.Google Scholar Let me briefly mention that capitalist ideology is a confounded ball of wax all its own; historians without number would be more than willing to call American economic habits between 1800 and 1860 “capitalist,” and it would take a careful mapping of attitudes and their limits to distinguish between the mentality of the entrepreneur in the antebellum decades with the mentality of the robber barons of the Gilded Age. The subject may deserve to be pursued but here is not the place.
10 I cannot adequately cite this interpretation; it is rather a sensibility I have from reading older works on agriculture.
11 On the fact of regional development, see Sanders, Elizabeth, Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-1917 (Chicago, 1999), chap. 2Google Scholar; Browne, Lynn Elaine and Sass, Steven, “The Transition from a Mill-Based to a Knowledge-Based Economy: New England, 1940-2000,” in Engines of Enterprise: An Economic History of New England, ed. Temin, Peter (Cambridge, MA, 2000), 201–49Google Scholar; Wright, Gavin, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York, 1986).Google Scholar In Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights and the Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003)Google Scholar, I tried to outline occupations for the regions existing in antebellum America as they had evolved by 1900 (Table 3.3, p. 77). I found that indeed New England and the Mid-Atlantic states had become industrialized, but the Great Lakes region had the profile that New York had in 1860, while the Deep South was almost more agricultural than it had been when slavery existed. These regional variations create massive problems for generalizations on a national scale, especially when regions left agriculture as the mainstay of its regional economy.
12 I add this endnote here because I may never get another chance to pursue it. I have often thought that the repayment of the debt that has occurred at times in American history deserves some attention from macroeconomic theorists because it may fully validate elements of Keynesian economics–yield the policies that counteract inflation and constitute the “supply-side” of Keynesian economics to balance its more well-known “demand-side” analysis. Keynesian economics arose because of a perceived failure in consumption to keep apace of supply for whatever reasons; the solution was for government to resort to programs pumping money to consumers; at the same time this action inevitably meant some curtailment of money available for investment. When the 1970s rolled around, there was an apparent theoretical failure in Keynesian theory because it could not formulate a reverse operation—how the government could aid the supply side without creating massive unemployment. But it would seem that the way the federal government could achieve such a feat was by paying off the national debt because such payments went explicitly to investors first and only later joined the general circulation of effects that would include consumers; demandside Keynesian economics distributes cash direcdy to consumers which then after time enters general circulation and so a proportion gets to investors. The two sides are thus explained by pretty much the same action; creating deficits and then eliminating them. In the case of the Gilded Age, the repayment of the national debt, at least theoretically, should have pumped money right into the investing sector, promoting a phenomenal capital growth that was unnecessarily unbalanced with consumption; the result would have been price declines and an apparent “underconsumption.”
13 As to the realignment of different groups cutting across classes, someone (I hope) may be interested in the explanation I gave in Calculating the Value of the Union, Appendix A, 237-51.