The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink

      Introduction

      One way or another, after 1875, there was growing skepticism about the effectiveness of the autonomous and self-correcting market economy, Adam Smith’s famous “hidden hand,” without some assistance from state and public authority. The hand was becoming visible in all sorts of ways.

      —E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914

      The Long Gilded Age encompasses a set of discrete but overlapping essays with three main themes. The first is that the arrangements and institutions that we now take for granted in American economic life depended, in fact, on a thick set of political ideas that were intensely fought over for decades before being consolidated in the opening years of the previous century. The second is that the question of workers’ power within industry lay at the center of many of these conflicts. Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, I argue for the internationalism of the processes at work across the prewar era. In particular, I hope to demonstrate that American outcomes offered but one set of variants within a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist marketplace and those determined to transform it according to socially defined ends, that American labor radicals and reformers were themselves intensely aware of the larger menu of historical and political possibilities of their age, and that the legacy of this earlier era of globalization offers possibilities yet to be fully tested in our own era, one famously baptized by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 as a new world order. ¹

      My contribution adds but a new twist to a mountain of judgments previously proffered upon a time period that itself is regularly open to vigorous debate about its duration and very name. Classically divided into two segments, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as these years recede ever farther from the present, insiders have commonly lumped the two together into one un-poetic amalgam called the GAPE. Both names, we quickly note, convey invidious distinctions rare to the appellations of other aggregates of time (compare “Jacksonian” or “Civil War era” or even “Roaring Twenties” or “Long 1960s”). Typically, the Gilded Age (named after the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner) pejoratively conjures up a period of unbridled urban-industrial expansion, government corruption, labor conflict, and recurrent depression from 1877 to roughly 1900. The Progressive Era, on the other hand, self-named by some of its own reform-minded champions, is likely to summon up more positive associations as an attempt by a variety of actors across the first two decades of the twentieth century (stopping just before or after U.S. engagement in World War I depending on the interpreter) to reckon with the very excesses of the Gilded Age.

      To be sure, historians themselves have never been happy with such simplistic dichotomization. Just as one can locate no shortage of creative reformers in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era also rings with scandal, corruption, and economic mayhem. Attempting to get beyond historical moralizing, a few scholars have famously ventured forth with more integrative conceptual tags for this period of national development, such as “the search for order,” “organizational society,” “age of modernization,” or, most recently, “new spirits.” With a more global view (and stopping at the watershed of the Great War), the masterful Eric Hobsbawm similarly unified the period in Marxian metaphor as “the age of empire.”

      Personally, and for the interpretive emphasis of this volume, I like playing off