The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

Gilded Age liberals sprang from a noble European and American lineage whose opposition to hierarchies and privileges made them enemies of the Catholic Church, monarchy, aristocracy, and human slavery. Nineteenth-century liberals stressed individual freedom, private property, economic competition, and small government. These ideological distinctions do not map easily onto the political beliefs of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Liberals, in particular, produced a varied progeny now scattered across the modern political spectrum. Modern liberals have inherited their namesakes’ concern with individual rights, but they do not tie those rights as closely to property as nineteenth-century liberals, and they have abandoned their distrust of government intervention in the economy. In this respect, they are more like Whigs.