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

Antimonopolists at their most conspiratorial thought it was bankers and plutocrats, but anyone who has spent much time in their correspondence gets the sense of men riding an avalanche that they could neither control nor stop. Charles Francis Adams dismissed them as mere money-getters and traders, for good reason. It might seem that in this great age of invention and innovation, it was the inventors who pushed society forward. But Thomas Edison served more as a symbol of invention and less as the thing itself. Actual invention resulted from the hands and minds of tens of thousands of American tinkerers and mechanics. Invention proved to be cumulative and cooperative;