Timely new book
Just began reading. This excellent review covers all the bases...
How the Gilded Age Got That Way
‘The Republic for Which It Stands’ (Oxford Press), by Richard White, a professor of American History at Stanford.
By the 1890s the nation was far richer, but also less egalitarian than it was at the end of the Civil War.
In the Gettysburg Address, in 1863, Lincoln promised “a new birth of freedom” for all Americans. As Richard White notes in “The Republic for Which It Stands,” a sweeping history of postwar 19th-century America, the Civil War did indeed give birth to a new nation, as Lincoln had promised, but in many ways it was not the one he had wished for.
Instead of a prosperous free-labor republic of independent citizens—taking their place in a “largely egalitarian society,” as Mr. White puts it—a very different America emerged, one that was radically transformed and freshly stratified. Because of new methods of production, new ways of organizing work and stunning accumulations of capital, the nation’s gross domestic product swelled to $320 billion at the end of the century from $69 billion in 1860. Along the way, Mr. White argues, a new, fabulously wealthy elite took charge of the economy and government.
In the decades after the war, investment poured into infrastructure, farming and capital goods. Many of the country’s major corporations were formed: U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, General Electric. Exports boomed. Food production soared. Railroads “spidered across the American landscape,” as Mr. White nicely puts it, opening the West to settlement, connecting the nation into a single market, and making it possible to haul crops and consumer goods almost anywhere in the United States. New mail-order companies such as Sears Roebuck offered shoppers from Maine to California everything from ready-made clothing to prefabricated houses. Federal support for homesteading opened once inaccessible reaches of the West to settlement. The America of 1900 was a far more dynamic country than it was in 1865.
At the same time, however, tides of immigration and breakneck urbanization turned large swaths of American cities into crowded, disease-ridden slums. Political corruption flourished. Tariffs, massive land grants and subsidies to railroads facilitated a flow of public resources into private hands and protected industries. Homesteading expedited the displacement of Indian tribes and led to the destruction of millions of acres that were too dry to be farmed. (Almost 50% of homesteads ended in failure within a few years.) Meanwhile, the promises of security and full citizenship made to freed slaves were largely forgotten. By the 1890s, Mr. White asserts, the U.S. was less egalitarian and less democratic than it had been at the end of the Civil War.
American character changed, too. Mr. White provocatively suggests that a tectonic shift in outlook can be inferred from the seemingly mundane sphere of life insurance. Between 1860 and 1870, the 43 life-insurance companies in the U.S. swelled to no fewer than 163. “Where once Americans had embraced providence,” he writes, “they now hedged it. Life had become property, and it belonged in an insurance company’s hands rather than God’s.”
In the course of Mr. White’s overarching political and economic narrative, he draws sharp portraits of the men and women who peopled the Gilded Age. He is especially good at bringing color to the era’s monochromatic politicians, like the perennial Republican presidential aspirant James G. Blaine. As E.L. Godkin remarked at the time, Blaine’s “audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable.” Blaine finally got his chance in 1884 but gratuitously insulted critical Irish voters, hobnobbed with big-money men and went down to defeat at the hands of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War. Cleveland, for his part, was “a man spectacularly unsuited by temperament and belief for his time and his place,” Mr. White writes. In the wake of the 1894 elections, which resulted in crippling losses for the Democrats, the overweight Cleveland “resembled a harpooned whale; whatever power he had was exhausted and the Republicans could haul him in and dispose of him when his term expired.”
Mr. White’s cast of characters includes titans of finance and industry such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, George Pullman and the ruthless railroad magnate Collis Huntington ; William Jennings Bryan, the prairie Populist; assorted labor leaders, such as Terence Powderly, the Catholic temperance man who built the Knights of Labor; reformers and women’s-rights advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard ; big-city crooks and political con men such as New York’s Boss Tweed; the brave African-American journalist Ida Wells, who forced the epidemic of Southern lynchings into the consciousness of Americans; and the showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who marketed enactments of “Old West” scenes while embracing up-to-date advertising methods.
Mr. White builds the central armature of his narrative around the rise and fall of the “liberal” wing of the Republican Party, which dominated the postwar era. In contrast to our own time, the term “liberal” then referred to people who embraced aggressive capitalism and distrusted a strong federal government. Liberals were also defined by their near-religious belief in the gold standard, which, they believed, ensured economic stability and economic progress. The proponents of a silver-based currency—broadly speaking Democrats, farmers and debtors—argued, by contrast, that gold was inherently deflationary, concentrating money and credit in the Northeast and starving the West and South of agricultural credit. Gold and silver, Mr. White observes, “became icons of deep beliefs and ways to talk about civilization, morality, [and] progress.”
Liberals generally supported lenient policies toward the former Confederate South and opposed federal efforts to protect former slaves from white violence. Even as Southern blacks were being slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation magazine, the leading voice of liberalism, loftily asserted: “The removal of white prejudice against the negro depends almost entirely on the negro himself.”
Around the same time, filth and rampant disease were exacting their own toll. “Nineteenth-century Americans were a sickly people,” Mr. White observes, citing statistical data; most notably, they died earlier than their antebellum forebears. Waterborne diseases became increasingly lethal; cholera in particular took hold in cities that seemed carpeted with rotting garbage, fetid water and decaying animal carcasses. In 1880 alone, New York City removed nearly 15,000 dead horses from its streets.
Increasingly, however, under pressure from reformers, cities began to accept the cleaning up of foul streets and rivers as a public responsibility. Mr. White manages to make even the development of urban sewage and water systems engrossing through his deft interweaving of engineering challenges, hard-nosed city politics and shifting social values. Not only did modern water treatment improve public health; it also fostered the rise of industries whose products required clean water. The Coca-Cola Co., for instance, owed its success largely to its innovative condensation of its formula into a syrup that could be shipped by rail to franchisees, who infused it with cheap, clean soda water.
Gilded Age Americans, for the most part, were thrilled by their nation’s economic dynamism, but by the last decade of the century there was a widespread sense that political institutions had been corrupted by plutocrats. Mr. White writes, summarizing the self-serving ethics epitomized by the financier J.P. Morgan: “A man of character might be dissipated, lie, cheat, steal, and either order or condone deeds punishable by time in a penitentiary, but he did not do those things to his friends.” Many liberals, with their belief in laissez-faire, had expected, Mr. White says, “a self-regulating order.” But they got instead “near chaos,” as poverty bred labor unrest and unrest bloodshed when federal troops cracked down on strikes.
Reformers demanded clean government and the regulation of corporations. Figures with reformist instincts, like Theodore Roosevelt, were on the rise inside the Republican Party, and populist Democrats were newly energized, such as the silver-tongued Bryan and the soon-to-be socialist Eugene Debs. Antimonopolists, “the largest and broadest of the era’s reform groupings,” Mr. White writes, looked to government to regulate railroads, clamp down on corruption, develop exacting administrative procedures, and build municipal water and sewage systems. As the author William Dean Howells, whose trajectory from enthusiastic liberal to troubled reformer epitomizes the evolution of elite thinking, wrote in 1895: “Liberty and poverty are incompatible.”
History rarely delivers an unambiguous lesson. But in this monumental yet highly readable book, Mr. White has given us a panorama of an age that in many ways seems like our own. The volcanic turmoil of the late 19th century did much to shape the world that we live in today, with its creative and destructive cycles of industry, its quickening technological change, its extremes of wealth and poverty, its struggle to impose fairness in the jungle of the marketplace, its tug of war between freedom and regulation in the public interest. “The Republic for Which It Stands” is, in no small part, the story of how we came to be who we are.
How the Gilded Age Got That Way
‘The Republic for Which It Stands’ (Oxford Press), by Richard White, a professor of American History at Stanford.
By the 1890s the nation was far richer, but also less egalitarian than it was at the end of the Civil War.
In the Gettysburg Address, in 1863, Lincoln promised “a new birth of freedom” for all Americans. As Richard White notes in “The Republic for Which It Stands,” a sweeping history of postwar 19th-century America, the Civil War did indeed give birth to a new nation, as Lincoln had promised, but in many ways it was not the one he had wished for.
Instead of a prosperous free-labor republic of independent citizens—taking their place in a “largely egalitarian society,” as Mr. White puts it—a very different America emerged, one that was radically transformed and freshly stratified. Because of new methods of production, new ways of organizing work and stunning accumulations of capital, the nation’s gross domestic product swelled to $320 billion at the end of the century from $69 billion in 1860. Along the way, Mr. White argues, a new, fabulously wealthy elite took charge of the economy and government.
In the decades after the war, investment poured into infrastructure, farming and capital goods. Many of the country’s major corporations were formed: U.S. Steel, Standard Oil, General Electric. Exports boomed. Food production soared. Railroads “spidered across the American landscape,” as Mr. White nicely puts it, opening the West to settlement, connecting the nation into a single market, and making it possible to haul crops and consumer goods almost anywhere in the United States. New mail-order companies such as Sears Roebuck offered shoppers from Maine to California everything from ready-made clothing to prefabricated houses. Federal support for homesteading opened once inaccessible reaches of the West to settlement. The America of 1900 was a far more dynamic country than it was in 1865.
At the same time, however, tides of immigration and breakneck urbanization turned large swaths of American cities into crowded, disease-ridden slums. Political corruption flourished. Tariffs, massive land grants and subsidies to railroads facilitated a flow of public resources into private hands and protected industries. Homesteading expedited the displacement of Indian tribes and led to the destruction of millions of acres that were too dry to be farmed. (Almost 50% of homesteads ended in failure within a few years.) Meanwhile, the promises of security and full citizenship made to freed slaves were largely forgotten. By the 1890s, Mr. White asserts, the U.S. was less egalitarian and less democratic than it had been at the end of the Civil War.
American character changed, too. Mr. White provocatively suggests that a tectonic shift in outlook can be inferred from the seemingly mundane sphere of life insurance. Between 1860 and 1870, the 43 life-insurance companies in the U.S. swelled to no fewer than 163. “Where once Americans had embraced providence,” he writes, “they now hedged it. Life had become property, and it belonged in an insurance company’s hands rather than God’s.”
In the course of Mr. White’s overarching political and economic narrative, he draws sharp portraits of the men and women who peopled the Gilded Age. He is especially good at bringing color to the era’s monochromatic politicians, like the perennial Republican presidential aspirant James G. Blaine. As E.L. Godkin remarked at the time, Blaine’s “audacity, good humor, horror of rebel brigadiers, and contempt for reformers made his nomination sooner or later inevitable.” Blaine finally got his chance in 1884 but gratuitously insulted critical Irish voters, hobnobbed with big-money men and went down to defeat at the hands of Grover Cleveland, the first Democrat to occupy the White House since before the Civil War. Cleveland, for his part, was “a man spectacularly unsuited by temperament and belief for his time and his place,” Mr. White writes. In the wake of the 1894 elections, which resulted in crippling losses for the Democrats, the overweight Cleveland “resembled a harpooned whale; whatever power he had was exhausted and the Republicans could haul him in and dispose of him when his term expired.”
Mr. White’s cast of characters includes titans of finance and industry such as J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, George Pullman and the ruthless railroad magnate Collis Huntington ; William Jennings Bryan, the prairie Populist; assorted labor leaders, such as Terence Powderly, the Catholic temperance man who built the Knights of Labor; reformers and women’s-rights advocates such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frances Willard ; big-city crooks and political con men such as New York’s Boss Tweed; the brave African-American journalist Ida Wells, who forced the epidemic of Southern lynchings into the consciousness of Americans; and the showman Buffalo Bill Cody, who marketed enactments of “Old West” scenes while embracing up-to-date advertising methods.
Mr. White builds the central armature of his narrative around the rise and fall of the “liberal” wing of the Republican Party, which dominated the postwar era. In contrast to our own time, the term “liberal” then referred to people who embraced aggressive capitalism and distrusted a strong federal government. Liberals were also defined by their near-religious belief in the gold standard, which, they believed, ensured economic stability and economic progress. The proponents of a silver-based currency—broadly speaking Democrats, farmers and debtors—argued, by contrast, that gold was inherently deflationary, concentrating money and credit in the Northeast and starving the West and South of agricultural credit. Gold and silver, Mr. White observes, “became icons of deep beliefs and ways to talk about civilization, morality, [and] progress.”
Liberals generally supported lenient policies toward the former Confederate South and opposed federal efforts to protect former slaves from white violence. Even as Southern blacks were being slaughtered by the Ku Klux Klan, the Nation magazine, the leading voice of liberalism, loftily asserted: “The removal of white prejudice against the negro depends almost entirely on the negro himself.”
Around the same time, filth and rampant disease were exacting their own toll. “Nineteenth-century Americans were a sickly people,” Mr. White observes, citing statistical data; most notably, they died earlier than their antebellum forebears. Waterborne diseases became increasingly lethal; cholera in particular took hold in cities that seemed carpeted with rotting garbage, fetid water and decaying animal carcasses. In 1880 alone, New York City removed nearly 15,000 dead horses from its streets.
Increasingly, however, under pressure from reformers, cities began to accept the cleaning up of foul streets and rivers as a public responsibility. Mr. White manages to make even the development of urban sewage and water systems engrossing through his deft interweaving of engineering challenges, hard-nosed city politics and shifting social values. Not only did modern water treatment improve public health; it also fostered the rise of industries whose products required clean water. The Coca-Cola Co., for instance, owed its success largely to its innovative condensation of its formula into a syrup that could be shipped by rail to franchisees, who infused it with cheap, clean soda water.
Gilded Age Americans, for the most part, were thrilled by their nation’s economic dynamism, but by the last decade of the century there was a widespread sense that political institutions had been corrupted by plutocrats. Mr. White writes, summarizing the self-serving ethics epitomized by the financier J.P. Morgan: “A man of character might be dissipated, lie, cheat, steal, and either order or condone deeds punishable by time in a penitentiary, but he did not do those things to his friends.” Many liberals, with their belief in laissez-faire, had expected, Mr. White says, “a self-regulating order.” But they got instead “near chaos,” as poverty bred labor unrest and unrest bloodshed when federal troops cracked down on strikes.
Reformers demanded clean government and the regulation of corporations. Figures with reformist instincts, like Theodore Roosevelt, were on the rise inside the Republican Party, and populist Democrats were newly energized, such as the silver-tongued Bryan and the soon-to-be socialist Eugene Debs. Antimonopolists, “the largest and broadest of the era’s reform groupings,” Mr. White writes, looked to government to regulate railroads, clamp down on corruption, develop exacting administrative procedures, and build municipal water and sewage systems. As the author William Dean Howells, whose trajectory from enthusiastic liberal to troubled reformer epitomizes the evolution of elite thinking, wrote in 1895: “Liberty and poverty are incompatible.”
History rarely delivers an unambiguous lesson. But in this monumental yet highly readable book, Mr. White has given us a panorama of an age that in many ways seems like our own. The volcanic turmoil of the late 19th century did much to shape the world that we live in today, with its creative and destructive cycles of industry, its quickening technological change, its extremes of wealth and poverty, its struggle to impose fairness in the jungle of the marketplace, its tug of war between freedom and regulation in the public interest. “The Republic for Which It Stands” is, in no small part, the story of how we came to be who we are.
No comments have been added yet.
