The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink
is, the standards of evidence-gathering and sifting that we assign to the historical craft), we look to history to understand our own place in time. That quest inevitably puts the questions asked of the past at the changing beck and call of the historian’s own times. We want to know what happened because it mattered in determining not only who we are but who we might have been—and thus what we can make of our own world. For that reason I currently prefer the option of “The Long Gilded Age” for the entire GAPE (for convenience, let’s round the years to 1880–1920). Critically inquisitive (if still inevitably somewhat pejorative), the phrase usefully refocuses attention on bursting social inequalities as well as the political management of industrial capitalism across a crucial and formative period of the nation’s development.
As regularly pointed out in U.S. history textbooks, the physical changes of the country in this period were stupendous and world-shaking. Carl Degler emphasized in what he called the “age of the economic revolution” that the rise of industry not only transformed how and where Americans lived but, by creating a near-unquenchable demand for labor, repeopled America with an industrial workforce drawn from the far corners of the globe. By 1890 the annual value of manufactured goods overtook the sum of agricultural commodities for the first time in American history, and within five years, the nation ranked fourth as of 1860 had become the world’s supreme industrial power. Likely the most tangible sign of the application of machine power to domestic and world trade was the railway grid: by 1890 U.S. trackage surpassed that of all Europe, including Russia. 2
To distinguish the turn-of-the-twentieth-century material changes from an earlier dynamic unleashed by textile manufactory and steam power in late eighteenth-century Britain, economic historians generally associate the Gilded Age with a “second industrial revolution.” Beginning with the Bessemer steel process, famously adopted by Andrew Carnegie in the mid-1870s, a leap in industrial productivity and consolidation depended on new technologies, including electricity, chemical engineering, as well as communications applications like the telegraph and radio. Bigness was both cause and effect of industrialization. By 1910, corporate consolidation had produced the Sugar Trust, the Beef Trust, the Steel Trust, the Oil Trust, and the Money Trust; alongside Carnegie, meat-packers Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour, railroad giant J. J. Hill, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, and mythical investment banker J. P. Morgan had become household names. 3 The science-and-technology base of American business preeminence by the early twentieth century equally depended on a new knowledge economy, manifest in a spreading network of research universities.
Geographically, the behemoth of the economic revolution was the industrial city: over one hundred cities grew by 100 percent or more in the decade of the 1880s alone, and by 1890 Chicago and Philadelphia had joined New York City as centers of more than a million residents. Whereas little more than a tenth of Americans lived in cities of more than 50,000 people in 1850, the “urban” population became a majority, as documented by the 1920 census. America’s urban-industrial revolution also entailed its own demographic upheaval. By 1910, immigrant workers—increasingly from southern and eastern Europe—dominated the labor force in coal and copper mining, iron and steel, construction, oil refining, as well as once proudly Yankee cotton textiles: as Herbert Gutman (with Ira Berlin) definitively concluded about the industrial landscape: “most American workers were immigrants or the children of immigrants.” 4
The material and technological changes of the era, dramatic as they were, have inclined us mistakenly to think of the Long Gilded Age as one where business, science, and economic interests mattered more than politics or ideas. Indeed, it is not uncommon to teach the GAPE as one where politics and culture (read, the Progressive Era) are struggling to “catch up with” economic and social change. Yet, this is surely a crude rendering of the inherent mutual dependence of the economic and political realms. As I hope to demonstrate in several of the succeeding essays, the law (as a reflection of both legislative and judicial processes) mattered a great deal in fashioning the peculiarities of American capitalism.
And nowhere, I suggest, was the particularism of American political development more in play than in the area of workplace relations between labor and management. Workers themselves, drawing at once on republican traditions of citizen action and on the yearnings of those yet to taste full citizenship rights, first took the initiative to demand a place at the economic table. Audaciously, the Knights of Labor used both the ballot box and the boycott to push for union recognition and the eight-hour day. The skilled trades and industrial unions like the mineworkers in the American Federation of Labor (AFL) likewise rebelled against wage cuts and the abuse of union representatives. Altogether, an era of titanic clashes in major industries including the railroads, coal, and steel as well as local strikes in manufacturing, urban transit, and construction placed the Labor Question (i.e., just what role should workers have in America’s new industrial economy?) front and center in political campaigns, legislative corridors, church pulpits, as well as social science scholarship.
Finally, I have become ever more aware of the provincialism of all nationally-confined chronological frameworks. This volume thus also self-consciously adds to a larger move by American historians (indeed, a move often made earlier by those outside U.S. history and especially by those writing about earlier periods) to see beyond national borders as well to situate what happens within those borders in a broader context or, as it is often now called, an America-in-the-world approach. This impulse was first formalized in the La Pietra Report issued in 2000 by the Organization of American Historians Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History: “If historians have often treated the nation as self-contained and undifferentiated, it is increasingly clear that this assumption is true in neither the present nor the past… . Both the nation and the other historical phenomena we examine must be resituated in larger contexts because the movements of people, money, knowledge, and things are not contained by single political units.” 5
Although it might be argued that any period of American history can benefit from a combination of comparative and transnational insights, the bona fides for the turn-of-the-century period are particularly compelling. More than ever before in its history, the U.S. economy was tethered to international forces, and the long-distance interactions—whether economic, political, or cultural—would not return to a similar state of intensity until our own times. A prior, mid-century transportation revolution—encompassing railroads, steamships, and construction of the Suez Canal—set the stage for a dizzying period of global movement, both human and commercial. By the late 1880s, for example, steamships were ferrying the majority of the world’s trade, and their plunging prices facilitated a new, mass steerage class of travelers. By 1914, Europe was importing more than three-quarters of its butter and wheat, and nearly half its meat—with the latter two products effectively fueling the North American farm economy. 6 Altogether, global trade as a share of global wealth would not reach its 1913 summit until 1970.
But the globe-trotting influences extended beyond the material and corporeal. As historian Thomas Bender has summarized, the global depressions of the 1870s and 1890s led many to question inherited economic orthodoxies. Like Daniel Rodgers before him, Bender points to the rise of an “awareness of the social,” or an environmental approach to the community’s welfare, that echoed among both academic and public policy elites. 6 Politically, it was a tendency that stretched from circles around the Catholic Church on the right to a reformed “new liberalism” of the center to out-and-out socialist revolutionism on the far left. Altogether, as British historian Charles Emmerson summed up the pre-World War I moment: “A world economy is interconnected as never before by flows of money, trade, and people, and by the unprecedented spread of new, distance-destroying technologies. A global society, perhaps even a global moral consciousness, is emerging as a result.” 8 A political phrase-maker, indeed, might well have characterized the era a new world order.
One might have expected labor historians—particularly those post-1960s “new labor historians” who added demography, migration, as well as race and gender dimensions to the study of their working-class subjects—to have earlier extended the geographic boundaries of their field. But, I think there are at least two reasons why the transnational move in this arena generally proved no more advanced than in most other subfields of American history. 9 For one, new labor historians were, in fact, consciously