Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-g7gxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T16:27:21.216Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Who Were the Gilders? And Other Seldom-Asked Questions about Business, Technology, and Political Economy in the United States, 1877–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 November 2010

Richard R. John
Richard R. John
Affiliation:
Columbia University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Historians of the United States have for many decades termed the late nineteenth century the “Gilded Age.” No consensus exists as to when this period began and ended, or how it might best be characterized. Most textbook authors place the origins of the Gilded Age around 1877 and its demise around 1900. Few would deny that this period witnessed a host of epochal innovations that included the rise of the modern industrial corporation, the building of large-scale technical systems, including the electric power grid, and the creation of governmental institutions that were conducive to rapid industrialization. Yet the significance of these innovations remained a matter of dispute.

Type
Forum: Should We Abolish the “Gilded Age”?
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 474 - 480
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2009

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

1 Gordon, Robert J., “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (Autumn 2000): 49–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 To be sure, the Gilded Age construct is not without its defenders even among historians of business, technology, and political economy. The social historian—turned—business historian Richard White has recently invoked it in a nonincidental way, as did the legal historian Michael Les Benedict. Even so, its most resolute champions remain social and cultural historians interested primarily in social relationships and cultural values. These include social historian Richard Schneirov and cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg. For White, the construct underscored the centrality of financial speculation to railroad-building (the Gilded Age as an age of speculative finance); for Benedict, the continuing vitality of the common law (the Gilded Age as a “golden age”). Schneirov, in contrast, used it to highlight the emergence of capital-intensive corporations (the Gilded Age as the first chapter in American capitalism); Trachtenberg used it to highlight the moral bankruptcy of business culture (the Gilded Age as institutionalized hypocrisy). White, Richard, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 19–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Benedict, Michael Les, “Law and Regulation in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era” in Law as Culture and Culture as haw: Essays in Honor of John Phillip Reid, ed. Hartog, Hendrik et al. (Madison, WI, 2000), 227–63Google Scholar; Schneirov, Richard, “Thoughts on Periodizing the Gilded Age: Capital Accumulation, Society, and Politics, 1873-1898,” Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era 5 (July 2006): 189–224CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Trachtenberg, Alan, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the GildedAge (New York, 1982)Google Scholar.

3 Josephson, Matthew, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1865-1901 (New York, 1934)Google Scholar; , Josephson, The Politicos, 1865-1896 (New York, 1938)Google Scholar.

4 Beatty, Jack, The Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America, 1865-1900 (New York, 2007)Google Scholar.

5 Congressional Record, 63rd Cong., 2nd sess. (Jan. 19, 1914), 1797Google Scholar.

6 On the considerable and often pernicious influence of E. L. Godkin's editorials on American historical writing, see Armstrong, William M., “Godkin's Nation as a Source of Gilded Age History: How Valuable?” South Atlantic Quarterly 72 (Autumn 1973): 476–93Google Scholar.

7 Bluestone, Daniel, Constructing Chicago (New Haven, 1991), 105–08Google Scholar, epilogue; Bender, Thomas and Taylor, William R., “Culture and Architecture: Some Aesthetic Tensions in the Shaping of Modern New York City” in Visions of the Modern City: Essays in History, Art, and Literature, ed. Sharpe, William and Wallock, Leonard (Baltimore, 1987), 189–219Google Scholar.

8 Summers, Mark, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (New York, 1987)Google Scholar. See also Thompson, Margaret Susan, The “Spider Web”: Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Ithaca, NY, 1985)Google Scholar. For an attempt to measure corruption, see Wallis, John Joseph, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History” in Corruption and Reform: Lessonsfrom America's Economic History, ed. Glaeser, Edward L. and Goldin, Claudia (Chicago, 2006), 23–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Calhoun, Charles W, “The Political Culture: Public Life and the Conduct of Politics” in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Calhoun, (Lanham, MD, 2007), 239–64Google Scholar.

10 Brock, William R., Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865-1900 (New York, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Teaford, Jon C., The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 (Baltimore, 1984)Google Scholar.

11 Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (New York, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), ch. 4Google Scholar, and , Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10 (Dec. 1982): 123–24Google Scholar.

12 Dorfman, Joseph, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New York 1949), 3:23Google Scholar; “The Freight Convention,” New York Times, May 8, 1873Google Scholar.

13 Nasaw, David, “Gilded Age Gospels” in Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy, ed. Fraser, Steve and Gerstle, Gary (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 123–48Google Scholar; Miller, George H., Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison, WI, 1971)Google Scholar: Benson, Lee, Merchants, Farmers, and Railroads: Railroad Regulation and New York Politics, 1850-1887 (Cambridge, MA, 1955)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA, 1977)Google Scholar. For a related discussion, see John, Richard R., “Turner, Beard, Chandler: Progressive Historians,” Business History Review 82 (Summer 2008): 227–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Morris, Charles R., The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (New York, 2005)Google Scholar. For a more judicious position, which credits Gould with kind of innovations that Alfred D. Chandler Jr. ascribed to corporate managers, see Klein, Maury, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore, 1986)Google Scholar, and Martin, Albro, “The Good That Men Do: A Review Essay,” Business History Review 60 (Autumn, 1986): 469–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Hughes, Thomas Parke, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

17 Hounshell, David A., “Hughesian History of Technology and Chandlerian Business History: Parallels, Departures, and Critics,” History and Technology: An International Journal 12:3 (1995): 205–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Hughes, Thomas P., “From Firm to Networked Systems,” Business History Review 79 (Autumn 2005): 587–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Bensel, Richard, The Political Economy of American Industrialisation, 1877-1900 (New York, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Bensel to Richard R. John, personal communication. The intellectual historian George M. Fredrickson has reached an analogous conclusion: The “Gilded Age” construct was deficient and should be abandoned because it left out the South; , Fredrickson, “Nineteenth-Century America n History” in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Molho, Anthony and Wood, Gordon S. (Princeton, 1998), 166Google Scholar.