One of the American historians I hold in high regard is Richard White, author of an excellent book on The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896. Naturally then I enjoyed a recent column he wrote for the Economist titled “The Gilded Age holds lessons for today.” His argument is that we today are living in a second Gilded Age recalling the first such example, and that fact has some predictive value because, as he writes, “Periods that follow Gilded Ages are eras in which politics catches up with revolutionary change.” In similar vein, Jon Grinspan has a piece in yesterday’s New York Times entitled “There Is a Way Out of This Mess,” which again draws close analogies between the eras. There is lots to discuss here, but I am going to evade the authors’ main arguments, however significant they might be, in order to concentrate on one usage, namely that of the “Gilded Age,” a term I have come to detest. Do understand that I am in no sense attacking the work of those two scholars, but rather addressing a popular historical term.
My current book project focuses on the early 1890s, an immensely creative period in many aspects of American culture and society, which find a focus in and around the great Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. The range of material I have to deal with is vast, but as I will explain, the periodization is very tricky indeed.
If someone asks what I am working on, just what do I say? As I’ll suggest, this would customarily be part of “the Gilded Age,” as studied by Richard White, but the further I go on, the less useful I find that term, for any era whatever. The sheer pace of change in the early 1890s must make us think about the conventional labels attached to these years, and by implication, how they are contextualized with other long-term trends. Of course, such labels are mainly flags of convenience for organizing college courses and historical survey texts, but they do disproportionately shape our expectations of the times in question.
Conventionally, the Gilded Age lasts from 1865 to … some amorphous point in the 1890s (I’ll come back to that uncertainty). The period takes its name from the satirical novel The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, published in 1873 and closely attuned to the political corruption scandals of that time.
Beyond the focus on endemic corruption, the phrase is often used to suggest the glaring paradoxes of later decades, when the Promethean triumphs of American industry seemed like a thin gilt or veneer disguising the gross injustices that they concealed, all the urban squalor and naked class repression. Just in the years from 1892 through 1894, we look at the extraordinary class violence associated with the great strikes at Homestead and the Pullman struggles, and juxtapose them with the wonderful mansions then being built for the super-rich in Newport RI, those sumptuous “cottages.” For what it is worth, the phrase “conspicuous consumption” was first coined in 1899. And if we are looking for additional horrors in progress below the gilded surface, this is of course the great era of the Indian Wars, culminating at Wounded Knee in 1890.
But surely, it would be difficult to find any era not marked by some such ill-fitting combination of conspicuous glories and sins. Depending on one’s point of view, what age (including our own) is not gilded? Richard White says, reasonably, that we today live in a Gilded Age. But is that different from the 1920s, or the 1950s, or the 1980s, or…? Do check out the Wikipedia entry on “Second Gilded Age,” which describes “a proposed time period of United States history said to have begun between the 1980s and 2010s and to have continued up to the present.” If everything is the Gilded Age, then nothing is.
And as for using the novel’s title for a label, let me offer an analogy. One of the triumphs in fiction in 1987 was Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, a sprawling satire of New York and its (well) gilded character at the time. It’s a terrific book to teach from, but surely, it would be ridiculous to speak of the whole era from the mid-1980s through 2020 (say) as the “Bonfire of the Vanities” Age. Some of the book’s features apply really well both to the mid-1980s and the 202os, and some absolutely don’t.
Moreover, the trivializing term Gilded Age gives no sense of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural advances of these years, especially in the 1880s and 1890s, and that applies all the more to the spectacular era that I am studying around 1892-1894. In its character, does 1893, for instance, have more in common with 1875 than with 1911? Or with 1930?
So when was the Gilded Age? True, 1865 marks an excellent transition point in American history for obvious reasons, but what about the end? The years of 1890, 1893, and 1896 are all used regularly in such contexts, while the war year of 1898 proves irresistible to many, as the supposed birth of a new imperial project. That epoch is then followed by the Progressive Era, which according to taste begins in 1890, or the 1890s generically, or perhaps the year 1900, and proceeds into the 1920s.
The categories are, however, multiply flawed, and especially if they are taken to imply any kind of consistency within the periods in question. To take the example of Richard White’s really fine book, he has to cover the history of the US in that thirty year period through two thoroughly overlapping accounts, of the Gilded Age and of Reconstruction. It is a delicate balancing act. So did the South not have a Gilded Age?
Again, if we tie the early and mid-1890s to the Gilded Age, then these years seem like a pale afterthought to the unabashed scramble for wealth and glory, leaving a tale with no proper outcome or aftermath. But linking them to the Progressive Era in practice means that the great advances of these years seem to come out of nowhere, and lack a foundation. In consequence, those years in the 1890s tend to exist as a historical no-man’s land, resisting contextualization.
Did the mid-1890s really mark a transition between eras? Well, the strikes and class violence were critical, but were they much different from the near-revolutions of 1877, or the urban violence of 1886? Yes, the crash of 1893 was a cataclysm, but how much worse was it from what followed the Panic of 1873? And if I look forward into later years, I can find endless parallels between 1893 and the crashes and great strikes of the early twentieth century. What changed, if anything, in the mid-1890s?
When did America stop being Gilded?
Reflecting this dilemma, the main professional association dedicated to the years between 1865 and 1930 draws no obvious line between the periods: it is the Society of Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, SHGAPE. In terms of choosing a suitable date for the coming of twentieth century American modernity, that flagship group has wisely decided not to decide.
So I will work hard on my book, but deciding what period it belongs to is a weighty task.
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