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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
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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

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References

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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.

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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.