The Long Gilded Age. Leon Fink

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The Long Gilded Age - Leon Fink


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      The Long Gilded Age

      AMERICAN BUSINESS, POLITICS, AND SOCIETY

      Series editors

      Andrew Wender Cohen, Pamela Walker Laird, Mark H. Rose, and Elizabeth Tandy Shermer

      Books in the series American Business, Politics, and Society explore the relationships over time between governmental institutions and the creation and performance of markets, firms, and industries large and small. The central theme of this series is that politics, law, and public policy—understood broadly to embrace not only lawmaking but also the structuring presence of governmental institutions—has been fundamental to the evolution of American business from the colonial era to the present. The series aims to explore, in particular, developments that have enduring consequences.

      A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

      THE LONG GILDED AGE

      AMERICAN CAPITALISM and the LESSONS of a NEW WORLD ORDER

      LEON FINK

       PENN

      UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

      PHILADELPHIA

      Copyright©2015 University of Pennsylvania Press

      All rights reserved.

      Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

      Published by

      University of Pennsylvania Press

      Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

      www.upenn.edu/pennpress

      Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

      1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

       Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Fink, Leon, 1948–

      The long Gilded Age : American capitalism and the lessons of a new world order / Leon Fink.—1st ed.

      p. cm.—(American business, politics, and society)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-0-8122-4688-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

      1. United States—History—1865–1921. 2. Capitalism—United States—History—19th century. 3. Capitalism—United States—History—20th century. 4. Labor—United States—History—19th century. 5. Labor—United States—History—20th century. 6. Globalization—History—19th century. 7. Globalization—History—20th century. I. Title. II. Series: American business, politics, and society.

      E661.F54 2015

973.8—dc23 2014029614

       To Nina, Naila, and Julius: A new world is ever being born.

       Contents

      _________

       Introduction

       Chapter 1. The American Ideology

       Chapter 2. Great Strikes Revisited

       Chapter 3. The University and Industrial Reform

       Chapter 4. Labor’s Search for Legitimacy

       Chapter 5. Coming of Age in Internationalist Times

       Epilogue

       Notes

       Index

       Acknowledgments

      Introduction

      One way or another, after 1875, there was growing skepticism about the effectiveness of the autonomous and self-correcting market economy, Adam Smith’s famous “hidden hand,” without some assistance from state and public authority. The hand was becoming visible in all sorts of ways.

      —E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914

      The Long Gilded Age encompasses a set of discrete but overlapping essays with three main themes. The first is that the arrangements and institutions that we now take for granted in American economic life depended, in fact, on a thick set of political ideas that were intensely fought over for decades before being consolidated in the opening years of the previous century. The second is that the question of workers’ power within industry lay at the center of many of these conflicts. Finally, and perhaps most provocatively, I argue for the internationalism of the processes at work across the prewar era. In particular, I hope to demonstrate that American outcomes offered but one set of variants within a worldwide confrontation between the capitalist marketplace and those determined to transform it according to socially defined ends, that American labor radicals and reformers were themselves intensely aware of the larger menu of historical and political possibilities of their age, and that the legacy of this earlier era of globalization offers possibilities yet to be fully tested in our own era, one famously baptized by President George H. W. Bush in 1990 as a new world order. 1

      My contribution adds but a new twist to a mountain of judgments previously proffered upon a time period that itself is regularly open to vigorous debate about its duration and very name. Classically divided into two segments, the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, as these years recede ever farther from the present, insiders have commonly lumped the two together into one un-poetic amalgam called the GAPE. Both names, we quickly note, convey invidious distinctions rare to the appellations of other aggregates of time (compare “Jacksonian” or “Civil War era” or even “Roaring Twenties” or “Long 1960s”). Typically, the Gilded Age (named after the 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner) pejoratively conjures up a period of unbridled urban-industrial expansion, government corruption, labor conflict, and recurrent depression from 1877 to roughly 1900. The Progressive Era, on the other hand, self-named by some of its own reform-minded champions, is likely to summon up more positive associations as an attempt by a variety of actors across the first two decades of the twentieth century (stopping just before or after U.S. engagement in World War I depending on the interpreter) to reckon with the very excesses of the Gilded Age.

      To be sure, historians themselves have never been happy with such simplistic dichotomization. Just as one can locate no shortage of creative reformers in the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era also rings with scandal, corruption, and economic mayhem. Attempting to get beyond historical moralizing, a few scholars have famously ventured forth with more integrative conceptual tags for this period of national development, such as “the search for order,” “organizational society,” “age of modernization,” or, most recently, “new spirits.” With a more global view (and stopping at the watershed of the Great War), the masterful Eric Hobsbawm similarly unified the period in Marxian metaphor as “the age of empire.”

      Personally, and for the interpretive emphasis of this volume, I like playing off


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