Given liberals’ suspicion of established institutions, it might seem odd that during the Gilded Age, they had ensconced themselves in American universities, the elite press, and Protestant churches, but they did. Liberal ideas dominated the Northern commercial and professional middle class, and this allowed even young liberals such as Henry James, Henry and Charles Francis Adams, Clarence King, and William Dean Howells to speak with precocious authority, even as they and other liberal writers often demeaned many of their readers.
