“A Good Deal of Free Advertising” despite her “Obscene Character”: Nuancing Media Portrayals of an Escaped Nun in the Gilded Age and Progressive Eras

Robert Putnam's Irving Kristol Turn Haimo Li (bio) Robert Putnam and Shaylyn Romney Garrett, The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2020. 465 pp. Notes and index. $32.50 This genuinely insightful book traces four curves in the development of American society from the Gilded Age to the present: economic inequality, political partisanship, social capital, and cultural narcissism. These curves, in the authors' view, follow an inverted-U shape, with the mid 20th century serving as a kind of golden age for the United States, and the late 19th and early 21st centuries the nadirs, full of fierce partisan strife, far-reaching economic and social inequalities, and various critical problems. The major force that brought the U.S. from the first trough to the peak, from Gilded to golden age, was a grassroots communitarian ethos that emerged during the Progressive Era. That orientation, Putnam and Garrett suggest, helped significantly to curb oligarchical plutocracy, while fostering more equality, cooperation, and solidarity throughout the population. Then the pendulum began swinging. A series of social movements that emerged in the United States after the mid-1960s, including school violence, urban unrest, civil rights movements, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations, and assassinations of politicians eventually triggered the start of a downward trend, lasting through today, another nadir for the authors. The focal point of this book is to introduce and provide a "new evidence-based narratives that encompasses the ups and downs of an entire century," thereby "setting a clearer agenda for choice going forward" (p. 314). Simply put, the authors' essential suggestion is that we should borrow the communitarian progressivism formula from those previous reformers who lived 100 years ago. The transition from the Gilded Age to Progressive Era is a strong case. For example, if we compare the intensity of political polarization during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, the former one is more severe and dramatic than the latter. Also, most scholars tend to agree that "the decline in congressional polarization occurred during the 1920s."1 That said, Putnam and Garrett are too hopeful that we can recapitulate the successes of the Progressive Era in generating a communitarian political culture in the twenty-first century. It is [End Page 317] not clear that the problems of the Gilded Age, such as "inequality, political polarization, social dislocation, and cultural narcissism" (p. 8), were actually all properly solved by the communitarian spirit of early-twentieth-century progressivism alone. And it seems even more dubious—an example of wishful thinking rather than scholarly rigor—to think that by creating a modern copy of that communitarian spirit, the United States can solve today's examples of inequality and political polarization. Many scholars tend to depict the current American political situation as a "New Gilded Age," however, we probably need to pay attention to the fact that the partisan clash that happened during the Gilded Age was fundamentally different from the widespread polarization today. As pointed out by political scientist Frances E. Lee, when we talk about contemporary political polarization, the term actually denotes a "wide divergence on an ideological continuum structuring alternative views on national policy." By contrast, that kind of phenomenon rarely happened in the Gilded Age. The ferocious partisan warfare at that era was mainly about spoils, patronage, and office—not about the "sharp party differences over national policy" per se, as the two major political parties at that time presented very few "programmatic alternatives" to each other.2 Moreover, there are many other vital differences between the current situation and the Gilded Age. For example, as pointed out by historian Patrick Maney, during the Gilded Age, the rich were often regarded with contempt or suspicion. Now, though, "when the rich flaunt their wealth as a sign of their success, the strongest emotion they provoke is envy." In other words, class envy has replaced class conflict.3 Another difference pointed out by some scholars is that there are now actually two different types of political and cultural polarization: one is issue polarization; the other is social/affective polarization (such as resentment and distrust).4 The second is particularly hard to...

Gilded Age Redux Jamie L. Pietruska (bio) Daniel Czitrom. New York Exposed: The Gilded Age Police Scandal that Launched the Progressive Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. xv + 398 pp. Figures, maps, notes, and index. $27.95. Leon Fink. The Long Gilded Age: American Capitalism and the Lessons of a New World Order. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. 206 pp. Table, notes, and index. $45.00. In the wake of the 2008 recession and Occupy Wall Street's indictment of wealth inequality and "the 1 percent," many journalists and economists announced the arrival of a second Gilded Age. In The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power (2015), labor historian Steve Fraser has identified a second Gilded Age, one in which Americans have failed to resist the inequalities of twenty-first-century capitalism. Yet the term "Gilded Age" has largely fallen out of favor among historians who have challenged the moralizing periodization in which an unprecedented era of wealth-making by late nineteenth-century "robber barons" was ameliorated by the Progressive Era that lasted from the turn of the century through World War I. Political and social historians have emphasized continuities in reform movements from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Elizabeth Sanders' Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (1999) and Charles Postel's The Populist Vision (2007) revealed that Populism did not die out in 1896 but lived on in progressive agrarian legislative agendas and a forward-looking business politics. A single long Progressive Era emerged in, for example, Michael McGerr's A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (2003) and Nell Irvin Painter's classic synthesis Standing at Armageddon: A Grassroots History of the Progressive Era (1989; 2008). Rebecca Edwards' influential New Spirits: Americans in the "Gilded Age" (2006; 2010; 2015) dates a long Progressive Era from 1865 to 1905, and Richard R. John has questioned the historical accuracy of the term "Gilded Age" itself, given that late nineteenth-century Americans, despite their appreciation of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 satire The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, did not actually describe their era as such.1 [End Page 457] Two noteworthy books, differing in scale and scope, have announced the return of the "Gilded Age." Leon Fink's The Long Gilded Age adopts the wide lens of a transnational and comparative analysis of labor politics and reform from 1880 to 1920, while Daniel Czitrom's New York Exposed illuminates a scandalous local landscape of New York City police corruption in the 1890s and moral reformers' crusade for a nonpartisan, anti-Tammany mode of municipal politics. Together they demonstrate the significance of the Gilded Age as a distinct historical era but also signal its relevance to our twenty-first-century sociopolitical order, particularly in terms of global capitalism, political corruption, and state-sanctioned violence. ________ Fink's book consists of five essays thematically focused on contests over the political ideologies that shaped late nineteenth-century economic life, ongoing struggles over workers' power, and transnational contexts for labor radicalism and reform. It internationalizes U.S. labor history and suggests "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" (p. 1). Fink offers fresh and compelling interpretations of some of the most well-known actors and episodes of the Gilded Age, emphasizing throughout that the twentieth-century dominance of consolidated corporate capitalism and the weakening of labor unionism was not a foregone conclusion. Deftly argued and elegantly written, The Long Gilded Age revitalizes familiar topics and is essential reading for anyone researching or teaching in this period. Fink begins by exploring the disjunctures between the free-labor ideal, which he calls the "American Ideology," and the realities of Gilded Age capitalism—in particular, industrial "wage slavery," contract labor, and convict labor. Fink also examines how labor unions successfully experimented with adapting principles of contractualism in the bituminous coal fields in 1897, the "Uprising of the...

COVID-19 has ushered in controversy and debate over Chinese wet markets, including calls for their immediate shutdown by major politicians and international figures. Despite their politicization, there is considerable confusion on what wet markets are and their relation to wildlife, sale of exotic animals and/or disease risk. This study examines US newspaper coverage of wet markets in the spring of 2020, finding that articles portrayed wet markets as metonyms for broader shifts in human–animal relations. In place of examining specific behaviors that threatened public health, coverage tended to emphasize the strangeness of meats and slaughter to a Western audience familiar with a broad gap between meat and animals, repeating tropes of Chinese dog or cat-eating. As a result, discomfort at wet market descriptions is easily translated into racial animus, associating inappropriate human–animal contact with cultural pathology and marking factory farming as a litmus test of a developed distance from nature.

Climate of scepticism: US newspaper coverage of the science of climate change

While research shows that ethnic minority entrepreneurs make a relevant contribution to economies, academic studies often convey a rather negative image of their entrepreneurship as necessity- rather than opportunity-driven, and with little innovation. This study examined the US newspaper coverage of these entrepreneurs during the five years before the economic downturn. It found that only one-tenth of the articles were negative, while two-thirds were positive. Two-thirds of the articles mentioned assistance programs that could help entrepreneurs. The vast majority of the articles presented positive frames of minority entrepreneurs and their contributions. This study found that newspapers can be important sources for ethnic minority individuals interested in becoming entrepreneurs and provide information useful in formulating public policy.

Social movements are at once the symptoms and the instruments of social progress. Ignore them and statesmanship is irrelevant; fail to use them and it is weak. Walter Lippmann In the spring of 18...

When new technologies are introduced to the public, their widespread adoption is dependent, in part, on news coverage (Rogers, 1995).Yet, as weblogs began to play major role in the public spheres of politics and journalism, journalists faced a paradox: how to cover a social phenomenon that was too large to ignore and posed a significant threat to their profession. This article examines how blogs were framed by US newspapers as the public became more aware of the blogging world. A content analysis of blog-related stories in major US newspapers from 1999 to 2005 was conducted. Findings suggest that newspaper coverage framed blogs as more beneficial to individuals and small cohorts than to larger social entities such as politics, business and journalism. Moreover, only in the realm of journalism were blogs framed as more of a threat than a benefit, and rarely were blogs considered an actual form of journalism.

Why Violence Matters:Radicalism, Politics, and Class War in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Beverly Gage In his 1966 article "Violence in American Labor Disputes," Philip Taft laid out a paradox for American history.1 On one hand, he wrote, class relations in the United States have been among the least ideological in the world. On the other hand, American labor conflicts have been among the world's most violent. "It may appear anomalous," Taft commented, "that the United States, a country in which class feeling and class ideology are almost entirely absent, has experienced a considerable amount of violence in labor disputes."2 He resolved this anomaly by arguing that class violence in the United States was mainly an adaptation to structural circumstances: In conflicts where vital interests, especially union recognition, were at stake, workers and employers tended to resort to brute force. By this logic, the intense violence of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era fit quite comfortably within the exceptionalist narrative of the United States as a nation largely free from ideological conflict. In the 40 years since Taft wrote his article, this has remained largely the conventional wisdom regarding ideological violence in the United States. To the degree that violence of any sort has figured into a story of American class relations, it has often been framed as a structural issue, the product of a weak state and a frontier culture rather than of an ideological commitment on the part of American workers to revolution or class war. And as with all conventional wisdom, there is a great deal of truth to this view. Certainly the United States never experienced anything like a viable revolutionary assault on the capitalist system, even during the turmoil of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Nor did most violence, in any age, stem from preexisting ideological commitments. [End Page 99] And yet there is something very strange about the suggestion that ideologically motivated violence did not much matter in American history, particularly when applied to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far from being a period of ideological timidity, the years between 1877 and 1920 were a time when major national controversies over the use of violence by left-wing radical and revolutionary groups—anarchists, syndicalists, Wobblies, militant trade unionists—erupted with remarkable frequency. Many of the events that inspired these controversies are well known to historians: the Haymarket bombing of 1886; the attempted murder of industrialist Henry Clay Frick by anarchist Alexander Berkman during the Homestead strike in 1892; the 1901 assassination of President William McKinley by self-proclaimed anarchist Leon Czolgosz; the murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steunenberg in December, 1905, for which Big Bill Haywood was eventually tried and acquitted; the 1910 dynamiting of the Los Angeles Times headquarters, which resulted in the conviction of nearly the entire leadership of the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers; the 1916 Preparedness Day bombing, for which radical Tom Mooney served decades in jail; the May Day and June 2 conspiracies of 1919, including the bombing of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's home; and the 1920 Wall Street explosion, which killed 39 people in the heart of the country's financial district. In addition to these relatively famous events, there were hundreds, if not thousands, of lesser-known, smaller-scale incidents. The newspapers of the era were filled with reports and rumors of violent attacks on the symbols of American government and business: bombs mailed to mayors and governors; dynamite found beneath railroad tracks or outside a factory door; threatening notes sent to police chiefs; mysterious explosions near an industrialist's home. The interesting question, then, is not why the United States has experienced so little ideological violence, but why historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, especially labor historians, have agreed so uniformly that it was not a major factor in American political life. That question provides the starting point for this essay. To some degree, the disjuncture between Taft's view of an ideology-free working class and the existence of targeted acts of radical violence is a matter of definition. When Taft wrote about industrial violence...

Although US Uncut and Occupy were two similar social movement organizations highlighting the rising levels of economic inequality in the United States after the Great Recession, Occupy received more media coverage than US Uncut. Through a qualitative comparison utilizing a variety of sources, this study found four possible reasons that can explain why Occupy received more media attention: (1) Occupy had more dramatic protest events; (2) Occupy was active during a time when people were more frustrated with the economy and Wall Street; (3) Occupy faced less competition from other protest events; and (4) Occupy held larger protest events.

One of the latest volumes in ABC-CLIO/Greenwood’s “Historical Explorations of Literature” series, The Gilded Age and Progressive Era is a useful and interesting introduction to framing key literary works of this time period in their historical context. Each volume in the series presents a discussion of four or five representative works of a historical era, such as the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicano Movement, the Jazz Age, and the Civil War Era.

Speed, Contraction, and Lost Opportunities Daryl A. Carter (bio) Patrick J. Maney. Bill Clinton: New Gilded Age President. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2016. 344 pp., 25 photographs, notes, index. $37.50. Russell L. Riley. Inside the Clinton White House. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. 464 pp., index. $29.95. Michael Nelson, Barbara A. Perry, Russell L. Riley. 42: Inside The Presidency of Bill Clinton. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2016. 324 pp., index. $89.95. In what historians have called the in-between years, the period between 1989 and 2001 was marred by growing racial, cultural, and economic tensions. The Cold War-victor United States was forced to consider how to redirect its attention and energies. These shifts in focus and priorities came to the fore with the election of the first Baby Boomer president, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. Three recent books address the contexts and legacy of the Clinton era in those in-between years. The 1980s and 1990s showcased the rises of cable television, advanced manufacturing, and the service sector, but also lost economic opportunity for millions of workers, the emergence of a new class of millionaires, and the beginnings of the information age. Patrick J. Maney's Bill Clinton: A New Gilded Age President shows us just how much the Clinton presidency reflected this New Gilded Age. The last two and a half decades of the twentieth century were filled with economic and technological changes and contradictions. These changes benefitted the national economy as a whole, yet millions of Americans were also displaced as a result what the author correctly calls globalization, though globalization was nothing new. The phenomenon has been a defining feature of the West from the transatlantic slave trade to the beginning of the second industrial revolution after the American Civil War, which led to the urbanization and diversification of the American economy and created profound changes to the American landscape during what Mark Twain famously dubbed "The Gilded Age." [End Page 291] The Gilded Age was far more interesting and complex, as Maney notes, than just business tycoons versus the exploited. The nation changed faster than anyone could have predicted. Farmers left for cities. Women advocated for new laws in the public square. Organized labor groups moved aggressively to improve the material and working conditions of their members. The diverse, at times conflicting, groups of Americans challenging the new normal became collectively known as Progressives. So important were their actions and advocacy that three American presidents—Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson—became known as the Progressive presidents. As Maney describes it, the United States has been in a Second Gilded Age since Gerald R. Ford's presidency (1974–1977). Just like the previous Gilded Age, this period was exceptional for the rapidity of change, often so quick that many Americans took years or even decades to recognize the profound shifts that were already underway in how they ate, exercised, worked, and communicated with one another. Moreover, the paradigm shift affected the United States' global reach and importance, also demonstrating how differently Americans' expectations of government had evolved. During the first three quarters of the twentieth century, Americans became accustomed to the growing power of the executive branch of government. From Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon, presidents imposed their will on the nation, using their office to increase the role of government in the private sector. Whether through taxation, education, public works programs, defense spending or new, more expansive legal interpretations of the Constitution, American presidents increasingly took a decidedly more liberal and government-centered approach to addressing the nation's problems, such as inequality, lack of opportunity and economic development. The Second Gilded Age, however, would present new challenges and difficulties. These challenges were brought on by America's shift to finance and technology, demographic change resulting from immigration reform in the 1960s and the desires of peoples from around the world to leave in the United States. Moreover, the tremendous upheaval of the 1960s and growing distrust of government among the general populace forced American political leaders, especially presidents, to pursue more limited power. Second Gilded...

Evaluation of Stigmatizing Language and Medical Errors in Neurology Coverage by US Newspapers

This study examines US newspaper coverage of lynching from 1805 to 1963 in the most expansive analysis of lynching news coverage undertaken to date. Throughout the 1880s, news coverage continued to lag the incidences of lynching despite rising violence. By 1897, news coverage exceeded lynchings, based on a ratio measuring the two that shows when newspaper editors considered lynching to be more newsworthy. One possible factor in the rising newsworthiness was the pioneering work of Black journalist Ida B. Wells, who launched her high-profile anti-lynching campaign in 1892. Other factors could be the sheer number of lynchings, which spiked in the early 1890s, as well as the growth in newspapers, the rise of sensational “yellow journalism,” the rise of the Black public sphere, and the emergence of the “New South” movement that viewed lynching as bad for the business climate. Implications of this finding are significant. It suggests Wells’s journalism challenged the lynching discourse in white newspapers to an extent not previously understood by scholars. Our study also found that lynching coverage in white-owned newspapers diverged sharply from coverage in the Black press which tended to emphasize civil society narratives and due process in the legal system.

Climate change and journalistic norms: A case-study of US mass-media coverage

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870